#84 – Life is defined by maintenance.

All you do in life is try to maintain it.  You eat for energy to do it again.  you sleep to do it again.  You work to pay for it again.  You do more or something new to make you happy…again.  Life becomes a huge cycle of maintenance.  Therefore:

#85 – The secret to life is to avoid or mitigate maintenance.

Set your bills to be paid automatically.  Eat well.  Learn to control your dreams so you’re not just sleeping.  Spend less so you need to work less.  Find out what makes you happy and keep on doing it.  Stop your mind from worrying about what you need to maintain in your house, but start accepting what doesn’t need to be maintained.

I’m not sure there’s a global norm or scientist/hygiene recommended expiration date on sheets.  There especially confusion (for me, at least) around sheets in the guest room.  Do you only put on the sheets when they arrive?  How long can you leave the sheets on there before someone uses them or they need to be washed again?  Do you just wash the sheets or do you wash the blankets at the same time intervals?  Does it really just depend on who you are?

Nothing good happens after midnight.

In the summer of 1996, my family took a trip around the country in a Winnebago.  Along the way, we stopped at Mount Rushmore.  In the middle of the night.

I was asleep as we rolled into the parking lot.  I’m not a quick one to rise, so by the time everyone was heading out to see how close they could get, I was just coming to.  In order to catch up, I had to go as I was;  in my underwear.  I was a newly converted boxer man, and I wasn’t afraid to show it.  We all strolled up in pajamas and such, right up through the main souvenir concourse and gazed at the giant faces carved into the mountain.

I was staying in a hotel with Kallie’s family, and I went over to the other room where everyone was.  As soon as I walked through the door, Wally prompted me to answer this question.  I paused, half defeated.  I thought I was in an unfair position due to my freshman dorm experience at Pitt.  You see, in Lothrop Hall, it’s all singles, and each room has a sink in it.  Being an introvert, prone to a crazy sleep schedule, and just general laziness, it’s only a matter of time before you cave and pee in the sink.  It’s straight up behaviorism psychology.  So yes, I’ve urinated in a sink, and I bet at least 90% of men who lived in Lothrop did as well.

Feel free to tell your stories or reasons below!

It’s been a while since I posted a personal update.  Things in married life go well.  New job goes well.  Thinking about going back to school in the fall.  That might be the level of detail you get in the updates going forward…not really sure.  I don’t really want to write about my life with Kallie without her involvement.  What you might see this category turn into would be a opening of the way I think or the way I act, or who I am despite my surroundings.  We’ll see how that works.

One thing that bothers me sometimes is that Kallie will get bunches of people reply to facebook status updates for her.  Sometimes, it’s people that she’s connected through me, but I don’t even talk to on facebook.  It’s not that I want the attention, it’s that I don’t understand why people are compelled to post to her messages in such volumes and so quickly too.  It lead me to believe it’s her.  Some how, people are connecting with her through her update.  She’s reaching them in a way that I’m not.

So we give science a try.  I put the blinking cursor in my status update field and told Kallie to post something as me.  Post something that she would say, if she were me in that moment.  She wasn’t allowed to reveal it was her.  We’d test if it was the content of the status updates or Kallie’s "aura" that people were drawn to.  Within seconds, we had a reply to "mmm, my house smells like freshly baked bread.  I love my wife."  Then another.  Then another from a person I barely know.  I think we found our answer.

It’s me.  I don’t know how to connect with people, or I don’t give them a clear path to understanding me to be more precise.  I wrap things in metaphor, vague allusions, or esoteric references.  Recently, my mom replied to one of my facebook status updates saying she didn’t understand my messages, and she wanted to know if it was her or even her age.  I’m fairly certain it’s actually me.  With this post though, perhaps I can shed some light on to how my mind works and even give some examples to help you better understand what I mean when I say or do something.

We’ll take it back to the days when I first started to post away messages on AIM.  I constantly got asked what they meant.  Well, I’ll tell you now and perhaps it will help you to predict my behavior.

Most of my messages were drawn from lyrics –

"I dream that she aims to be the bloom upon my misery." – This comes from a Soul Coughing song called "I Miss the Girl".  That’s basically what I was saying.

"I feel as if i’m looking at the world from the bottom of a well." – This comes from a Mike Doughty song.  It just meant that I was sad, or I felt trapped, away from the world.

"Getting lost in the fall, glimmer, sparkle, and fade." – This came from Everclear’s album, Sparkle and Fade.   I thought it was a pretty sentiment to describe moods where I felt like a life of a star; people were lucky to catch a glimpse of a falling star, marveled at it’s glimmer and sparkle, and then it fades away.  I used it to express that I had just done something I enjoyed but probably won’t do again.

  "True dreams of Wichita." – More Soul Coughing.  Meant I wanted to travel or that I had a weird dream.

"I’ll be your best kept secret and your biggest mistake." – lines that follow "can I lay in your bed all day?" by Fallout Boy.  Usually meant I liked a new girl.

"Need more friends with wings, all the angels I know put concrete in my veins." – Billy Talent lyrics.  Means I missed people or felt crappy without friends.

"Looking at the man in the mirror and telling him to change his ways." – Michael Jackson, but taken quite literally when used.

"the world through a windshield is callous and cheap.  i toss and i turn but i can’t get to sleep.  counting the hours the days that turn into weeks" – The New Amsterdams lyrics.  Usually meant that I felt like I was just waiting for life to happen.

"Some times, it causes me to tremble."  – My favorite hymn, "Were You There?".  Usually an Easter away message.

"I’m shoulder high in crap and my water wings are flat." – President of the United States of America lyrics.  Usually meant I was stressed about something.

"I remind myself of some body else’s song." – Lifehouse lyrics.  Tongue and cheek mostly.

"Awake and dreaming." – Finger Eleven lyrics.  I was being reflective.

"This is the part where we start to feel better." – Gratitude lyrics.  something was making me sad.

A lot of my messages were my own creation –

"I’m allergic to the sun.  It makes my skin change color."  – This message was usually used when I didn’t want to go outside.

"I’m a pretty shallow guy deep down."  - It’s true.

"Warning:  This aoler may be potentially unstable.  Proceed to message with caution." – I was probably livid about something.  "Livid" was also used as an away message.

"projectiling a bee of fris across a botanical plane in attempts to approach and ultimately arrive at the X axis’ limits, while not offending the Y axis’ limits, at which point those efforts are reciprocated by an opposing force." –   I was playing ultimate frisbee.

"Let’s go get stoned.  Just like how they did in the Bible." – Just thought it was funny.

Some were direct quotes from movies or literature–

"The moments we shared are lost in time, like tears in a rain storm."  -This comes from the movie "Blade Runner".  I found it profound and quite beautiful.  It’s deep, thinking that there’s no use to cry when it’s raining.

"Closing my eyes and opening my mind in the clarity of passion."  – I’m not certain which source this came from, but it may have been from the movie "Atonement".  I usually used this one when I was falling asleep content to ponder life’s questions.

"Cheyne Stoking." – This comes from an excellent movie called "Dead Man Shoes".  At one point in the movie, the main character paints those words on an apartment wall of some "bad guys" while they’re not there.  It’s a medical term to describe periods of irregular breathing; most commonly the last grasps for breath.  I liked the phrase, so i put it up.  Possibly meant that I thought I was going to die sometime/eventually/inevitably.

"In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo." – This is from T.S. Elliot’s poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.  I just used it to say I was talking to my smart wiminz.  Another away message I used, partly inspired from Keren’s song and the poem, was "Measuring out my life with a coffee spoon."

When I’m with you, %n, we stay up all night, and when you’re gone, I can’t get to sleep.  Thank God for these insomnias, and the differences between them."  – Remember, %n was replaced with the viewer’s screen name.  That was fun.  Anyway, I saw a performance at Heinz Hall of the Pittsburgh Symphony, and in between pieces, they would have readings and this was one of them.  I have no idea of the origin, and can’t seem to find anything through google.  It means I was in love or at least infatuated.

"James 4:8 " – The verse is "Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded."  This was my personal motto.  Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.  Life is that simple.  When I was searching for why I felt so disconnected from Christ, I simply have to [go to church, volunteer, call a friend to talk, pray] etc.  I needed this scripture during that time of my life.

"Super perfundo on the early eve of your day." – This comes from my favorite movie, Waking Life.  It’s a phrase that one of the characters has said to him in one of his dreams, but even he doesn’t know what it means.  It’s basically used as just a greeting/farewell.

"Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods.  I do not know how far my experience is common.  At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all.  – H. G. Wells" – Pretty much the only good line from War of the Worlds.  I resonated with this deeply.

The rest were either weird, boring, or a mix of the above categories –

"He’s a maniac, maniac, on the floor, and he’s cleaning like he’s never cleaned before." – This meant I was cleaning.  Taken from the Flash Dance theme song.

"This away message is fleeting human contact.  both of us lost, but for a moment we’re lost together.  I wonder who you are." – I believe this to be an internet meme, but I can’t nail the true source.  It may have been that simply substituted "away message" in for grafitti.  see XKCD.

"Falto Algo." – Spanish for "Something is missing".  My boss used to say this. 

"Over the river and through the woods, to grandmother’s house I go." – I was visiting my grandmother.

"Home again, home again, jiggity jig." – I went home.

Ofcourse, there are the ones that meant I was sleeping…

"Dead.  At least to the untrained eye."

"Sleep with all the lights on." – Dashboard Confessional lyrics.  Most appropriately used when sleeping during the day  ie: night shift.

"some where between the sacred silence and sleep." – System of a Down lyrics.  Usually meant it was really late and I was still up for some reason.

"Under the Tahitian moon." – Porno for Pyros lyrics. 

"Stress Level Elimination Exercise Plan" (SLEEP)" – own of my originals.  Paired with:

"Stress Induced Narcoleptic Seizures (S.I.N.S.)" – another original that I still use.

So, I hope this provides you with a little bit of a road map on being able to predict what I may be trying to convey in my own mysterious way.  Default to it being lyrics for something.  Then think that I just saw/read something that imbued me.  I’m not all that hard to figure out or predict.  I think.  Did this help?

When the most beautiful words I never spoke,
Are at the tip of my tongue and then I choke
On the possibility that you might respond,
And then we’ll meet, and I’ll grow fond
Of the way your hair slowly covers your eye.
Or the way your hand gently brushes mine.
Or how the blood from my heart rushes
At every one of your sparking touches;
Forcing my eyes to shut and body stilled;
A quick deep breath and my lungs are filled.
I can’t move. The only thing moving is my mind,
And all the images of you that it can find;
Projected onto the back of my eyelids as a screen;
Debuting a movie that no one else has seen…
Or ever will, because once I regain sight,
And start to gaze at the most beautiful thing in my life,
The movie goes back into production inside my head.
But maybe I’ll get to catch a sneak peak as I sleep in my bed.
All this goes on in the matter of seconds.
And when it’s all over, my heart beckons
For another moment just like it.
A moment where my body won’t fight it.
How your touch invokes something so intangible.
So much beyond anything imaginable.
And all I can do is imagine us there,
At that same table, at that same restaurant,
At the same time, and our bodies in the same spot;
Your eyes focused on mine, and mine on yours.
And we stop time around us for what seems like hours.
Just you and I, continuing our lives without the world around us.
And we’ll continue talking about how love found us,
And put us together for the very first time.
How everything was easy as it just fell into line.
I never knew what I was looking for until I met you.
I never knew how to act until I watched what you do.
When you talk to people that you don’t know.
How they walk away after with a certain glow.
And as for me, I’m a lighthouse shining bright;
Protecting your shores from lost ships at night.
Letting them know that I am guarding your beaches.
And that tonight, land will be out their reaches.
They’ll have to set anchor in the ocean as blue,
As the eyes I’m staring at; the eyes of you.

This was a poem I wrote back in February of 2007 I was reminded of it when I watched this short film:

Nuit Blanche from Spy Films on Vimeo.

1. When did you last sleep in a bed outside your home? - hehe, umm…the night before last?  SCANDAL!
2. When did you last drive someone else’s car? – Hey, my truck is in the shop!  >:(  I have been driving Kallie or Deirdre’s car a lot.  I need my truck in all this snow though!
3. When did you last cook in someone else’s kitchen? – Define cooking.  I think i helped a little here or there with dinner at Kallie’s last week.
4. When did you last care for children who aren’t yours? – That aren’t mine?  that scares me.
5. When did you last do someone else’s job? – If we’re talking strictly work/career, than I have no idea, because no one knows who does what anymore!  As a project manager, it’s just my job to make sure it gets done!

turning 25 on the 16th…wow.  Deirdre just showed me a pic from my high school soccer days and said, "here’s you almost 10 years ago."  WTF  10 years ago??!  When the crap did that happen!?!?  shoot.  I havent done half of what i had hoped i’d do by the time i’m 25.  It’s really depressing, but most birthdays are for me.  That’s why I don’t work for that whole week.  Just so i don’t have the risk of having "a bad day" and getting even more depressed.  I don’t care if i sleep all day or if i am productive all day, the only thing that’s important is that I’m happy.  Egocentric and self-indulgant?  Mayhaps.  This year I’m going down to vegas.  WEEEEE.

As another indicator of how low ludicrous my degree is, I didn’t turn in the first assignment in one of my classes, half-arsed it through the whole class, it was supposed to be a professional writing class and I can’t think of one paper that I turned in.  But i got an A.  WTF.  When I first started back at school, i thought it was just me being an excellent slacker and social engineer, but now i realize it’s the lack of anything challenging, consequential, or pressured.  Mostly.  With one of the last 2 classes i have to finish, I have to write a 10 page paper.  That’s rather overwhelming to me.  I think i’ve written 1 twelve page paper before…at Pitt…during the whole semester.  This will give me 5 weeks to do it.  I think it might be our only grade, or the majority of our entire grade.   Joy in buckets i tell ya.

I think i found a good open mic to play at regularly on Monday nights.  I want to get a email list set up for people, and the most obvious/easiest for me would be to use the newsletter function built into this site.  So the trick is to get people to go through the registration process.  I might just try to do a batch user add with all my friend’s email addresses and set their passwords to something generic.  We’ll see what I can do…I do see that they hey ya acoustic cover in the downloads section has been downloaded 30 times though, and that’s pretty acceptable to me.  I think i’m going to jump into the studio, probably my uncle kenny’s, and record a demo CD to hand out to people.  That will give me some good quality recordings to replace the bad ones too.

Luke ravenstahl, the pittsburgh mayor, came by my house the other day.  he was walking through the hill district trying to get voters and i just so happen to notice him.  He came up to my door to meet me and shake my hand and ask me about what i did and how long i lived there and any issues I had.  I could have drilled him with questions like what is that "propel pittsburgh" committee doing, if anything, and why didnt i get on it, and why don’t you just take your own car to country concerts, and why don’t you chill out a bit when you’re obviously under the spotlight for being young and immature?  but that would have taken some preparation and relied on me being able to overcome the shock of seeing the mayor in my front yard, which did not happen.  Oh well.  Not like i vote anyway.  I am definitely seeing good stuff in the development of the hill district though, so i’d like to get behind him 100%, but dude just needs to be a little more considerate of how the city thinks of him and what he does.

wow.  I think i see a trend going on here.  i woke up at almost 4:15am from this dream.  I had gone to bed about 4 am last night and slept until 5:30, and went to bed around 1am.  I’ll have to start recording the times and such of these dreams.  I’m going to leave out a few details to keep the authenticity of the dream; ie there were a few people in the dream that shouldn’t have been, but they weren’t family and they were distracting from the plot.  for reference sake though, I punched andrew bonnell in the face for giving me his AOL screenname so that I could contact him when i woke up.  but wow, i just realized something…I’ll come back to this after i tell the dream…

So deirdre and I are driving around in a truck of sorts, and we drive by a store called SEKI and they only sell pepsi products.  not important at all, but I’m leaving it in there because it’s weird.  anyway, we were talking, she gets out, next thing i know is i’m in the estate driveway facing the road in a tractor pulling a cart, I loop to the right in the yard and come back around to drive behind the house and i look to the right where there is a lone pine tree and Dante is tied to it barking.  I park the tractor and run over to pet him and play around with him.  Someone else comes over, a young guy, I recognize him, but now that i woke up i can’t remember who he is.  But seeing him and dante confirmed to me that this was a dream, and I am visiting the dead.  I said, "so this is really afterlife i’m visiting, isn’t it?" and he just looked like he wasn’t allowed to confirm that to me.  Then I let Dante off the chain and walk inside the house with him up to the top left bedroom where there is a large bed in it’s normal spot and serah and J’aime are there.  This is where we’re talking with some guy and we get on the conversation of being able to talk to everyone there when I wake up.  He says that he has AOL IM and that if I sent him a message, he’d respond.  And so I’m l said, "well, i need to know your screenname"  and i was feeling stressed to get this information before I woke up.  And he said something like "oh well, you just message me and you’ll be good" and when he said that, I knew he was lying to me about having messenger at all.  this is where he is now andrew bonnell and i punch him in the face and yell at him for not being legit with me on an important topic and wasting my time.  j’aime and serah cool things down and we talk a little more about how this place is the afterlife.  We know that my dad is outside working on something.

Then I realize with nervous excitement, "Guys, this means that Barney (my grandfather) is probably out in the barn…do you want to go see him??"  J’aime seemed more excited than serah, but we decide we’ll go.  So we are walking downstairs talking about what he’ll be like and I start to get blurry vision, like i’m about to wake up, but i consciously force myself back to sleep.  When we turn the corner into the dining room, dante had followed us, and I note to serah how great it is to see dante.  I can actuall feel him.  I said how firm he feels and how short his hair is, just as I remember him.  I don’t know how to express how real this dream is besides that.  we are going to walk out the addition door, and when we get in the addition, it’s been worked on.  There’s a lot of work to be done, but all the walls are finished and there’s a stairway down to the basement.  I can see through it that there’s a light on downstairs, and I get the feeling that someone is down there…but I don’t find out…I fear that it was (grandmother’s mother? aunt? i forget), who hung herself in the basement.  Anyway, it’s obvious that my dad had been working on the place.  We go out on the deck and can see my dad over in the park working.  I ask Serah and J’aime if they want to spend anytime with him.  J’aime just looks at Serah as if it’s up to her and Serah says that she’d rather not.  So we walk down and I yell for my dad, thinking that he should introduce us, but Serah shows resistance, so I yell back nevermind.  It’s funny how common place it seems that we’re there.  Anyway, I step into the barn, and I am definitely a little scared as to what I’ll find, the lights are all on, the pocket door to the main area is shut and i loudly say, "Hello?"  Then I hear some feet on the gravel outside, and I turn and catch a glimpse of him before he turns quickly away out of shock and says, "Oh my goodness, Josh?!" as if he’s embarrassed.  He turns back around, big smile on his face, and kind of chuckles out of disbelief that we’re there.  He looks a lot like the pictures of him being old, grey hair and kinda fat.  He’s sweating and dirty like he’s been working, has a white baseball hat on that he takes off to meet us and he’s wearing some reddish over alls.  So we just start talking about how he looks alot like i thought he would, and how i always thought he looked so much different in pictures of him old vs him young.  My dad comes over as we talk by the stone wall infront of the barn.  Then, my dad’s friend Bruce shows up there too, and we’re talking as if he knows about visiting here all the time too.  Then i mention to Barney about how it seems that all hall men die around their 50s, and that uncle kenny and I were trying to remember how everyone had died.  He told me as far back as his grandfather that all died around then.  I don’t remember the reasons why.  I then asked him if there were any women, and he said there was one, and he goes to get like a genealogy book, but I never get to see it before I wake up.

So, the thing i just realized…I had just emailed serah today asking if she had any memories of caleb being normal, because I do not.  I wonder if i’m unable to dream about caleb being normal because I don’t have those visions in my head, so i replace him with other people that are around his age, like the guy outside with dante and andrew bonnell.  Then i remember from the movie "What dreams may come" that cuba gooding Jr was a doctor in robin william’s life, but he’s really his son.  And I’ll admit, that I have thought of andrew bonnell as a relationship i’d have with caleb.  Not that andrew and I even talk, but just that he’s around the same age and we get along pretty well.  With that, it’s an easier fit that Caleb is in these dreams too, and I did have the sense that he was always there, but as i reflect back, i can’t remember him being there.

I have such an urge to email serah and J’aime and see what they dreamed about last night, but I’m a little more rational than to think they had the same dream.  Wouldn’t that be messed up?