SUPPLICATION

“Give ear to my words and consider my plea. Listen to my cry for help, as I lay my requests before you and wait in expectation. Oh, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory! Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain. I beseech you to respond to this offering which I make to you, that I may be freed from all dangers of soul and body. How many are my foes! How many rise up against me! Arise, and deliver me! Strike all my enemies on the jaw; break the teeth of the wicked! I beg both for myself and for my relations and benefactors, friends and enemies, pardon for our sins, and the grace of perseverance in good, whereby we may save our souls. Give us relief from our distress; be merciful to us and hear my prayer. Obtain for us peace of heart; assist us in all our actions; succor us promptly in all our spiritual and temporal needs; console and defend us in our dangers. I ask for peace between nations, for humane rulers, and for tranquility among peoples; and grant that we may one day all rejoice together in paradise.”

“I’m sorry sir,” said the large woman behind the counter, “but you lack the proper documentation. You need three forms of valid identification. You need to have these notarized and you need to fill these out in triplicate. Be sure to sign in all the appropriate places and you need to acquire the additional validating signatures. Come by again next week and we’ll see where you’re at. NEXT!”

Mediocrity

I’ve been thinking – I’m not at all alright – there’s something wrong – I need an intervention – I need a group, like AA, but there is no group for my problem – this is strange because I’m certain that my problem has got to be among the most widespread (if not the most) problem on earth – mediocrity – I need a twelve-step program, but there isn’t one, so I’m starting one – I figure if the drunks and fatties and crazies can have one – there’s a Clutterers Anonymous for godsake – then I can have one too – I was going to call it MA, but the masturbators and the marijuana and methadone junkies already have it, so I’m calling it MAX – Mediocritics (Mediocrities? Mediocritites? Mediocres? – I haven’t decided which is best) Anonymous – I’m not sure what the X is for – maybe Generation X – we are, to be sure, the most mediocre of them all – maybe the X stands for all the areas in which we don’t excel – I like the X regardless because (besides the obvious reasons) MAX is the Latin morpheme for greatness which is what we lack the most – zero greatness – our world need greatness and I can’t find it anywhere – we need an intervention and MAX is here with the answers we need – we must steps toward recovery and since this is my idea, I’ll begin – hi, my name is Max, and I’m a Mediocritic – “HI MAX”
STEP 1 – I admit that I have no power over my mediocrity—that my life has become pathetic.
STEP 2 – I have come to believe that a Power greater than myself could restore me to sanity – I have to admit that I’m not entirely sure what this means – Maybe Stephen Covey
STEP 3 – I’ve made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God as I understand Him – again, I’m a little confused – either God is or God isn’t – why would I turn my will and life over to my understanding of God when my understanding is so likely flawed – anyway, moving on
STEP 4 – I have made a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself and let me tell you, it was pathetic
STEP 5 (here’s the kicker) – I will admit to God, to myself, and to the world all of my shortcomings (both real and imaginary) – This is where you come in – I’ll give you the short list:
Shortcoming #1: I DO NOT PARTICULARLY LIKE NUTRITIOUS FOOD: we were at a couple’s house recently and they are seriously healthy eaters and she (Laura) was spouting off facts about eating – at one point she mentioned something along the lines of eating a sandwich or a bowl of cereal or something (I wasn’t really listening) was equivalent to eating five Snickers bars and I thought “why the hell have I been eating sandwiches when, all this time I could have been eating Snickers bars.” Perhaps this explains my ever-increasing pants size.
Shortcoming #2 : I’M NOT A VERY GOOD TEACHER : I had a small epiphany today – one of the reasons I think I probably enjoy teaching so much is that it’s a gigantic ego boost – the fact that high school students are so incredibly stupid makes me feel, via comparison, amazingly intelligent and wise – I’m infinitely smarter that your average high school student, and as it turns out the minority of smart ones actually like me and I like them – the really stupid ones almost always hate me, but in light of their immense stupidity – their disdain can easily be viewed as a compliment – which of course is how I view it – My feeling is that if the whiners are not whining, I’m probably not doing my job. (Of course, there is always the argument that asserts that I believe the ones that like me are more intelligent than the ones that don’t b/c I’m a self-centered, narcissistic egomaniac, and while that may be true, I admit nothing)
Shortcoming #3 : I’M BETTER AT SMOKING CIGARETTES THAN I AM AT ANYTHING ELSE: everyone’s got to be good at something, right – I love cigarettes and smoke them at every available opportunity – it’s a good thing that I’m only addicted to nicotine and not something really serious like heroine or crack b/c if I were I’d definitely be a crackwhore (obviously I’m not saying that I’d have sex with you for a cigarette, but on the other hand – how many cigarettes are we talking about?)
Shortcoming #4 : I DON'T CARE AT ALL – at this point in the schoolyear, I just want to get it over with and it takes every ounce of vigor I can muster to just pretend like I care if they study for their upcoming tests – since most of my tests are essay tests its better for me if they don’t study b/c obviously wrong and blank answers are incredibly easy to grade – so by all means little munchkins, watch TV and hang out at the malls and makeout with your girlfriends whatever you need to do to avoid studying b/c it saves me tons of time and effort.
Shortcoming #5 : I DON’T EXERCISE
Shortcoming #6 : I CONSTANTLY PROCRASTINATE
Shortcoming #7 : I WASTE TOO MUCH TIME
Shortcoming #8 : I HAVE NO SELF-DISCIPLINE
Shortcoming #9 : I HAVE TROUBLE SEEING THINGS THROUGH TO COMPLETION – you know what, I’ve completely lost interest in this idea – screw it – forget I said anything

WRIGHT’S LAST WORK

Wright's last work, nearly finished when he died in 1966, is composed in wide sweeping strokes, adding insult, injury, and absurdity to the main themes of his previous novels. Set at the turn of the 17th century, Wright follows the life of Edward Sutton, 5th Baron Dudley, sometimes known as the English Leonardo da Vinci, as he transforms Dudley Castle and the manors of Dudley into a coke-fired furnace of passion and commerce. As always, Wright spikes his narrative with the juxtaposition of historical fact and erotic intrigue, creating a fugue of ecstacy, as he did in Caveat Emptor 1942, and The Monkey Season 1945, but for hardcore Wright fans the heart of this book will be the long chapter entitled "Questionable Coupling." This section includes a graphic description of Dudley’s liaisons with his longterm mistress Elizabeth Tomlinson, who bore him a large family of illegitimate children. The 57th chapter, "The Structure of Iron," on the other hand, reads like the tax code as Wright drags the reader though Dudley’s struggles with his incompetent son, Dud Dudley, as Dud single-handedly destroys everything Lord Dudley has worked his entire life to create. While Wright 's obtuse wording, and tendency toward sentences several pages in length can seem to mock his brilliant insights into the grand structures of the human condition, and often make the reader want to end his own life, Wright’s brilliance still manages to shine through and even decades after his death, Wright is still at the top of the heap.

THE SPIDER OR THE BEE

I watched a spider capture a honey bee today – it was quite a feat – the bee was already caught in the web, but its abdomen was searching for something to kill – the spider had to be agile – isolating and immobilizing the top of the bee while avoiding the twisting, angry abdomen – even after she’d wrapped the bee eight tenths of the way that pointy end was still down there going pop-pop-pop – trying to exact vengeance even in death – the spider went up to the top and laid into the head and the pops of the stinger-extensions became slower but more resolute – stretching – extending – twisting more than one might imagine possible over and over again ever more slowly and yet ever more extremely until the extensions of the stinger finally ceased – even then the spider waited quite a while before she finished wrapping the bee – while I was watching, a car accident I happened across the other day appeared in my mind – I remembered the fact that a lady we went to college with just died from an infection in her pancreas and the question emerged in my mind: are we all the spider carefully working around the deadly peril in order to sustain ourselves or are we all the bee, already caught in the web but unsure about what’s going to happen next?

DREAM GARDEN

walled in limestone, the garden was shaded by oaks, maples, and ash and cooled by a spring fed brook – everywhere there were flowers – assemblages of anemones, crowds of calla lilies, and knots of narcissus – but the tulips and roses outshined them all among the islands of lush bluegrass – it was like Eden – with fruit trees and vines and flagstone paths and the birds – the birds were abundant beyond description – there were warblers and oriels and finches – every kind of brightly colored songbird and hummingbirds and bees – paths ran throughout the garden and though its heart – in the very heart was a great gnarled oak – it was squat and wide with extremely large branches protruding perpendicular to the trunk – from the largest of these hung an enormous wind chime made from bronze tubing, like a pipe organ and its low mysterious tones could be heard from anywhere along the paths within the walls – occasionally, next to the paths there would be a most comfortable bench – when seated on a bench or walking on the paths, the garden was a magical place and it smelled like goodness and peace and mystery

WHATEVER COULD BE, MUST BE!

In the oppressive glare of the impersonal metropolitan shimmer, amphibian fabrications smashed flat as stone lie open and unnoticed as if to say, “the dogs are coming and we’ve not yet . . . stone . . . this is the last time . . . stone . . . listen . . .”

In the wide open spaces of the city streets, they would wander with us – perhaps then – perhaps, as if, in the cool of the mountain glade on the leeward side of the storm – whistling through the needles of the mind – after we’d left the sea and the islands of our youth to wander through the streets, dreaming of forests of . . . stone . . . perhaps we’d know the truth – but the truth is not free and it comes only to those who search – who search for their . . . we search for pizza and forgetfulness, for faucets that don’t drip and clocks that tick and monkeys that talk – a mix of the ridiculous and who knows what . . .

In the mists of the ancient forests, there lie the secrets of a thousand years hidden in the great Gregorian pillars of the pines – why are we here – what are we to do – if the ferns would sing the answers . . . if the deer . . . the wolf . . . the toad . . . the stone . . . the world . . . the misty dripping mosses . . . the aged lichens . . . answers to the search for the secrets of the ages – where are we – who are we – whole lives lapsed and the cost is death . . .

In the caverns of my mind there are many rooms, if it were not so I would have told you – I’ve prepared the fire – the thanksgivings – the sweet aroma of the years, but where are the smells and tastes and feelings you borrowed from the movies?

So I was licking this toad and he was saying that the world is like a box of chocolates and I said, “Look! There are clues to be found and poisonous snakes and jellyfish and manta rays and mortgages and eyes that see and ears that hear and noses and arms and air-speed-velocity and leprechauns and Albanians and lemurs and swine flu and William Shatner!”

WHATEVER COULD BE, MUST BE!

An Onanistic Calculus

DISSERTATION ABSTRACT

Onan, Randolph. "An Onanistic Calculus: The Production of a New Tropology," Department of Anthropology, Sussex University, February 1998.

This dissertation explores a new understanding of the holistic causality and intra-activity of, in general, the production of a contrived, malthusianistic fluid tropology, creating a unique anti-metonymy, existing exclusively in the trans-factual perspective of a multifaceted, idiosyncratic framework. In a new reconsideration of the codetermining, concrete plurality of the controversion of the predominate cosmology which, as a controlling constant, has often been ignored in appurtenant discourse, this exploration will be focused on treating itself as a paradigm of metonymy, linking being with history in a mimetic epistemology, just awakened from its dogmatic slumbers, centered in the dialectic. In particular, this exploration declares the efficacy of the generative mechanism of structures, the magnifying of a uniquely personal, metonymic, onanistic calculus, and claims its polemics are best understood as substitution instances of rhythmic temporality conjoined with spaciality, in the quest for a new conception of all phenomena as an ongoing deconstructive dialogue between the epistemologically horizontal and the phenomenologically reflexive. In Part I, it will be argued that these polemics are necessary for the construction of all meaning within the interstices of one’s own privileged locus of disclosure, engaging the postconstitutional, malthusianistic, and the ontological in a prioritized triunity of space, time, and joie de vivre, condensing the spatializing, processual exercise of their causal and initially immanent status into the representation of an intentional causal agency of emergent structurata (polarized spheres which are necessarily in apposition to phenomenological juxtaposition). In Part II, it will be argued that the epistemological tenets and mannerisms of poststructuralist discourses are not conjunctural in outcome, but rather are embodied in and ultimately fashioned from the polemical discourses of the past to improve the illusion of significance, which calls attention to its own artiface. Finally, in Part III, it will be demonstrated that what has been traditionally considered a preternatural, onanistic, and narcissistic phenomenon, strongly associated with the willful (and perhaps perverse) subversion of the holistic premise, takes itself as its only real subject and reality as a structure of the bricolage conforming in many ways to the exile of phenomenalism, resulting in what can only be described as a potentially generative, but ultimately, utterly ineffectual exercise.

ANYTHING IS BETTER THAN NOTHING

While it may be true, as the Earl of Chesterfield wrote to his son, that “Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well,” it must be at least as true that whatever is worth doing at all, is better done poorly than not at all – this has become a sort of mantra for me (anything worth doing is better done poorly than not at all – or if you prefer the shortened version: anything is better than nothing) – I say it to myself constantly throughout the day – I suffer from a tendency toward perfection – not the useful form of perfectionism that allows some great people to achieve higher and higher levels of excellence – far from it, my particular brand of perfectionism causes me to tend to get lost in the most useless analysis of minutia making it almost impossible to complete anything – it’s the sort of perfectionism that once a flaw is discovered, it takes every bit of will that I can muster to avoid scrapping the whole thing – it’s the kind of perfectionism that causes me to freeze at the beginning of an endeavor for fear of making a mistake and ruining the whole thing – over the years, I’ve come up with a number of strategies to combat this stupid tendency, but the best one of all has been to intentionally accepting poor performance at the outset – to say to myself and anyone else who is willing to listen that it’s going to suck, but we have to start somewhere – next time we’ll try to make it suck a little bit less – when you add to all this my tendency to procrastinate and couple that with the fact that I’ve been busier this month than I can ever remember being at any other time in my life, what you end up with is this present post that’s going to suck (next time I’ll try to make it suck a little bit less)

When I began thinking about writing a blog in December, I made it a goal to write 12 posts (one for each month) on or before the 1st of each month – I even allotted ten minute time slots on Saturdays and Sundays, so that I’d have a whole eighty minutes in which to write each post – once again, this month I didn’t use the allotted time and so here I am, once again, on the last day of the month, with nothing written and even less to say – when this sort of thing happens, I rely on the maxim, “anything is better than nothing,” because it is a fact (at least in the areas of discipline) – I use it when I’m planning my classes – I use it when I’m trying to exercise – I use it when I’m organizing, cleaning, and sorting – in short, any time I have something to do that I’ve endeavored to do that I haven’t done and I don’t feel like doing, I rely on the mantra and the mantra gets me through.

META-BLOG POST

The heavy-set bald man with a goatee sat in front of the computer – he was tired and didn’t feel like writing, but he had written about that so many times that it was no longer interesting (not even to him) – still, he had to write something – for years his friends had told him that he ought to write a blog – “it’ll be great,” they said – “people will want to read it,” they said – he knew that it wasn’t great and as far as he could tell, the only people reading the blog were the friends who’d told him to write it – actually, he didn’t even know that for sure because after the first couple of posts, people had ceased to leave comments – he found this very uninspiring – was it really too much to leave a comment and a name after reading? He reminded himself that he was not writing these posts for other people to read – considering that there are over 100 million blogs out there, it’s highly unlikely that someone might happen upon his and begin reading and enjoying it – he also reminded himself that he wrote solely for the pleasure and the discipline of it – in the same spirit that some (insane?) people prepare for and run marathons or play golf or build little airplanes that actually fly – some not very accomplished painters paint because it is sometimes pleasurable to do so – he wondered if those same unaccomplished painters had to make themselves paint even when they didn’t feel like it because if they didn’t paint now (when they didn’t particularly feel like it) they might never paint again – when he’d finally decided to write this blog, he made it a goal to write at least one post every month for a year – he’d thought that this would be easily achievable – he’d even allotted a couple of ten minute slots during week in which work on it – but as is so often the case, he’d ignored the plan and here he was (again) at the end of the month having written nothing – he’d even made a plan for what to write about – he was supposed to be writing about work and how work is really a blessing and fulfillment is a state of mind – he was so full of this sort of bullshit that it oozed from his very pores – he could go on and on about shit like that for hours – a couple of minutes might be inspirational, but he had a unique gift for taking the inspirational and stretching it into the sort of tedium that can typically only be achieved by lines in government agencies – he was thinking about all these things and about how he didn’t feel like writing about work or anything else really and he was looking for a way to cheat – a way to not write, but still meet the monthly goal – it was then that he remembered that a little over a year ago, he had discovered a list of surrealist techniques on Wikipedia and he’d thought it might be fun to try to go through them one by one and try to do verbally what the surrealists had done visually – that’s what he’d thought, but the first one, aerography, had given him some trouble – he’d had no idea how or why a three-dimensional object would be used as a stencil and even less of an idea how he would translate that idea into words – but then he’d started playing around with it – a stencil is just a way of translating the idea of an object onto a page – like a symbol – so what would constitute a three-dimensional way of bringing forth a symbol in words – an idea had occurred to him – the idea was about a man typing about a man typing about a man typing [ad infinitum] – he’d figured that it would either turn out to be mildly clever or completely stupid – it had, in fact, failed to achieve either of those outcomes – it was neither a hit nor a miss – it’d been like one of those darts that gets stuck in the outer frame of the dartboard – it’s not worth anything, but it didn’t miss the board completely – a couple of weeks after he’d written it, he’d been reading The Stinky Cheese Man to his two beautiful daughters when he came across “Jack’s Story” and realized that not only was his little idea not original, but that Jon Scieszka had done it with much more purpose and flair (a bull’s eye, to extend the previous metaphor) – it might have bothered him more except that he really liked Jon Scieszka and the fact that he’d independently thought of something that Jon Scieszka had done made him feel kind of clever after all – after further consideration, however, it occurred to him that both he an Scieszka had probably both come across this little rouse somewhere before (although he could not begin to imagine/remember where or when) and that he should not feel clever about it at all – so he’d stopped feeling clever and he continued to not feel clever and he figured that as long as he did not feel clever, there was no point in trying to be clever – and as long as he did not feel like writing, there was no point in trying to write something from scratch – instead, what he ought to do is borrow the aerography idea and re-use it for the post (it wasn’t doing him any good just sitting in the Word file) – with all this in his mind, he put his fingers on the page and began to type:

“The heavy-set bald man with a goatee sat in front of the computer – he was tired and didn’t feel like writing, but he had written about that so many times that it was no longer interesting (not even to him) – still, he had to write something – for years his friends had told him that he ought to write a blog – “it’ll be great,” they said – “people will want to read it,” they said – he knew that it wasn’t great and as far as he could tell, the only people reading the blog were the friends who’d told him to write it – actually, he didn’t even know that for sure because after the first couple of posts, people had ceased to leave comments – he found this very uninspiring – was it really too much to leave a comment and a name after reading? He reminded himself that he was not writing these posts for other people to read – considering that there are over 100 million blogs out there, it’s highly unlikely that someone might happen upon his and begin reading and enjoying it – he also reminded himself that he wrote solely for the pleasure and the discipline of it – in the same spirit that some (insane?) people prepare for and run marathons or play golf or build little airplanes that actually fly – some not very accomplished painters paint because it is sometimes pleasurable to do so – he wondered if those same unaccomplished painters had to make themselves paint even when they didn’t feel like it because if they didn’t paint now (when they didn’t particularly feel like it) they might never paint again – when he’d finally decided to write this blog, he made it a goal to write at least one post every month for a year – he’d thought that this would be easily achievable – he’d even allotted a couple of ten minute slots during week in which work on it – but as is so often the case, he’d ignored the plan and here he was (again) at the end of the month having written nothing – he’d even made a plan for what to write about – he was supposed to be writing about work and how work is really a blessing and fulfillment is a state of mind – he was so full of this sort of bullshit that it oozed from his very pores – he could go on and on about shit like that for hours – a couple of minutes might be inspirational, but he had a unique gift for taking the inspirational and stretching it into the sort of tedium that can typically only be achieved by lines in government agencies – he was thinking about all these things and about how he didn’t feel like writing about work or anything else really and he was looking for a way to cheat – a way to not write, but still meet the monthly goal – it was then that he remembered that a little over a year ago, he had discovered a list of surrealist techniques on Wikipedia and he’d thought it might be fun to try to go through them one by one and try to do verbally what the surrealists had done visually – that’s what he’d thought, but the first one, aerography, had given him some trouble – he’d had no idea how or why a three-dimensional object would be used as a stencil and even less of an idea how he would translate that idea into words – but then he’d started playing around with it – a stencil is just a way of translating the idea of an object onto a page – like a symbol – so what would constitute a three-dimensional way of bringing forth a symbol in words – an idea had occurred to him – the idea was about a man typing about a man typing about a man typing [ad infinitum] – he’d figured that it would either turn out to be mildly clever or completely stupid – it had, in fact, failed to achieve either of those outcomes – it was neither a hit nor a miss – it’d been like one of those darts that gets stuck in the outer frame of the dartboard – it’s not worth anything, but it didn’t miss the board completely – a couple of weeks after he’d written it, he’d been reading The Stinky Cheese Man to his two beautiful daughters when he came across “Jack’s Story” and realized that not only was his little idea not original, but that Jon Scieszka had done it with much more purpose and flair (a bull’s eye, to extend the previous metaphor) – it might have bothered him more except that he really liked Jon Scieszka and the fact that he’d independently thought of something that Jon Scieszka had done made him feel kind of clever after all – after further consideration, however, it occurred to him that both he an Scieszka had probably both come across this little rouse somewhere before (although he could not begin to imagine/remember where or when) and that he should not feel clever about it at all – so he’d stopped feeling clever and he continued to not feel clever and he figured that as long as he did not feel clever, there was no point in trying to be clever – and as long as he did not feel like writing, there was no point in trying to write something from scratch – instead, what he ought to do is borrow the aerography idea and re-use it for the post (it wasn’t doing him any good just sitting in the Word file) – with all this in his mind, he put his fingers on the page and began to type . . ."

DELUSIONS OF PROFICIENCY

When I was four years old, my father showed me how to play chess. He taught me all the names of the pieces and how each of them moved and occasionally he would play with me. I really liked chess and wanted to play it all the time. So in grade school, whenever there was an opportunity, I would play chess with the other grade schoolers and I would always win. I got the idea that I was a really great chess player and I was able to maintain this idea until 7th grade. That year, we moved to Sioux City, Iowa. One of my new little friends invited me to a sleep over. He had a chess board and that evening I convinced him to play with me. I was certain that I would win because I’d always won before, but he beat me. It was disturbing. I was sure that it must have been a fluke, so I made him play me two more times that night and he beat me again and again. It turned out that he had been in a chess club in grade school and they had been taught some elementary strategies – strategies far superior to my own. After a while, I picked up some of these strategies and was able to beat him about half the time, but I suspect that he was still a bit better than I was. We moved again and later in high school the idea of playing chess occurred to some of us. I was once again able to beat my friends nearly all of the time and once again I began to think that I was a pretty good chess player. As a freshman in college, I saw some guys playing chess in the dorm lobby. I asked if I could play the winner. They didn’t know me, but they reluctantly agreed. He beat me in three moves. I later discovered that the strategy he used against me is easily defended against and is only useful when one wants to quickly dismiss an idiot who doesn’t know how to play chess. Later on, at a different college, a friend of mine and I (both unskilled chess players) decided to learn the game from each other by playing daily over lunch. It was very enjoyable and while we may not have learned that much about chess, we started noticing that chess is a lot like life. One day my friend observed after losing a game that, as with life, at the beginning the options and possibilities for success are practically limitless but with each move those options decrease considerably down and down until there is only one move left and then it’s over. It may be worth mentioning that my game improved to the point that I tended to beat everyone at school that I came across and again I began to became rather smug about my skills that is until I played my wife’s uncle Steve (who has a chess federation rating). Playing chess with him was as if I didn’t even know how to play the game. I felt like I’d been spun around blindfolded, given a piece of chalk, and told to solve the calculus problems on the board. The fact that I don’t understand calculus didn’t even enter my mind. I didn’t even know where the board was. I bring all this up because life is like chess and in my life I have occasionally felt full of myself and thought that I was a rather proficient player only to find out later that I really didn’t know what I was doing. As with chess, life has multitudinous levels of competency. I’m a rather unskilled chess player and I suspect that I’m a rather unskilled liver as well. In the book of Proverbs, the Hebrew word for “wisdom” is “hokmah” (or something like that). Typically, this word had to do with the skill of artisans and professionals – relating to their knowledge, experience, and efficiency in their areas of expertise. Thus, the word “wisdom” in Proverbs has to do with expertise in the art of living and the wise are those who demonstrate outstanding knowledge, experience, and efficiency in this art. I am not any more a wise man than I am a skilled chess player, but I’m working on it.

25 RANDOM THINGS

1. When I began thinking about writing a blog in December, I made it a goal to write 12 posts (one for each month) on or before the 1st of each month – I even allotted ten minute time slots on Saturdays and Sundays, so that I’d have a whole eighty minutes in which to write each post – this month I didn’t use the allotted time – I was either too tired, apathetic, or busy to do it – consequently, I didn’t write the post I’d planned to write – I did however write a list of 25 random things for Facebook – since some of the things need to be amended before I present it to the mixed crowd that makes up my group of friends on Facebook and since almost no one reads these posts and since I’m rapidly running out of time in February to post this, I’ve decided that this month’s post will be the 25 random things – this feels a bit like cheating to me, so my punishment will be that I still must complete all ten posts from the Top Ten List this year

2. I’ve almost completely discarded the mechanical rules of Standard English Usage (mostly punctuation) in my electronic correspondence with my friends – this may seem ironic since I am an English teacher by profession, but I rather think that it is the very fact that I spend so many of my waking hours trying to get unwilling adolescents to comply with these very rules that I so willing discard them when given the chance – it’s somehow very satisfying to just write without consideration for the rules – that, and the fact that I’m usually just too lazy to reach for the period or shift buttons

3. Mr. Harbour said that a wise man once said that "nobody likes a narcissist but himself." This would explain why I barely have enough friends on Facebook to send this to. I love Mr. Harbour and I too miss our times together at the all-night, smoke-filled café – some of the fondest memories of my life – but I think that I speak for narcissists everywhere when I say that we choose our friends carefully (as I did with my dear friend Mr. Harbour) for their patience and . . . their . . . umm . . . their patience – I guess it’s not so much that we choose our friends, but rather the people that remain after they’ve come to know us – the people that don’t hide when they see us or cross the street to avoid us, some of those people become our friends – I say some because the other problem with narcissists is that we are not very fond of most people – most people are tedious at best and tend toward arduous – this of course does not include any of you – you, my friends, are the few people that I enjoy that also enjoy me – there are, by the way, a number of people (really cool people) whom I enjoy who do not enjoy me – to them, I am tedious – and that’s fair – after all, most of us are – of the over six billion people, I suspect that there are fewer than a thousand or so that I would enjoy spending more than a few minutes with – it’s just the way it is; no use feeling bad about it

4. I try never to take anything personally – nothing other people do is about me – people are crazy and they do stupid things – I have no control over any of this – consequently, I choose not to care about it – I choose to believe that it’s not about me – this is why I never take anything personally – if people choose not to like or respect me, they are obviously confused (maybe they thought I was someone else) or idiots (you can’t argue with idiots; they’re crazy – it’s sad) – their ridiculous behavior is out of my control; no point in taking it personally – do you take it personally when dogs bark as you walk down the street? Or when they pee on your trees? Of course not – they’re dogs – who gives a shit what dogs do? That’s how I feel about everything – I take everything as a compliment unless there is clear evidence to the contrary – if there is clear evidence that someone bears me some malice, I assume he is an idiot; but as with the dog on the street, I do keep one eye on him cause some of those bastards bite

5. the problem with discipline is that it’s so damn intrusive – you can’t have cookies right now cause you’re on a diet – you have to go run now, cause it’s time to exercise – my psyche bristles at such commands, and immediately demands that I recline all day eating cookies and not running – it’s like I have an insurgency in my psyche sabotaging all my disciplined plans – thus, I must come up with crazy ways to undermine the sabotage – for instance, the only way that I’ve found that I can make myself run (and not eat cookies) is to change clothes and go immediately when I arrive home from school – if I hesitate for even a moment, the terrorists have won – if I take too long to stretch, the terrorists have won – when I finish the run, I must immediately grade one folder of work or the terrorists have won – my days after school seem to be made up of psychic battles between the parts of my psyche that wants to accomplish things and the evil parts that want to overthrow the present regime

6. The only thing we have to fear is stupid people doing stupid things. Stupid individuals are bad enough (especially when one of them is me) – but stupid people in groups are the most dangerous of all – occasionally, one of my students will say that even though Hitler was bad, he was a genius – NO HITLER WAS NOT A GENIUS!!!!! He may have been an effective orator – guess what so is Farrakhan (is Farrakhan a genius?) – apart from that, Hitler was an idiot and everyone who followed him was a fucking idiot and everyone who knew what he was doing, but turned a blind eye was a pathetic, cowardly idiot – the world is full of idiots – individual idiots (sometimes it’s me) and idiots in groups (sometime it’s us) – Sadly, it’s probably us as often as it’s them.

7. there is a voice in my head that tells me that I am a complete failure – that I am a fraud and that sometime soon (any moment now) I will be discovered for the fraud that I am and it will be revealed to all – I’ve come to call it “the accusatory voice” and I think it predates THE EGOMAN – it’s always there (even when THE EGOMAN seems to be on vacation) – and it took me a long time to come up with strategies that effectively combat this voice – one strategy is to agree immediately and even verbally say, “I suck or I’m so stupid” – I say these things throughout the day it might seem foolish (like negative self-talk), but it’s not – what it does it turn off the repetitive (you suck, you suck, you suck, you suck, you suck, you suck, etc.) accusation going on in my head – I don’t know why it works – it just does – say it once and forget about it – another thing that I do to combat “the accusatory voice” is that whenever I do make some sort of mistake or error – whenever I actually do something stupid, I share it with everyone until I feel better – I try to do it under the guise of humor, but it doesn’t really make any difference – it’s the sharing that’s important – if I don’t share the mistake, then “the accusatory voice” has ammunition with which to attack me – after I’ve shared, I can respond that I agree that I am stupid and that everybody already knows about that – these and other strategies effectively quiet “the accusatory voice” to white noise in the back of my psyche chanting “you suck, you suck, you suck, you suck, you suck, you suck” as THE EGOMAN chants “you’re so great – you’re so great – you’re so great – you’re so great) – I very rarely pay either of them any attention anymore

8. I think that the theory of evolution offers an adequate explanation of life on earth

9. there is a voice in my head that tells me that I am great, that everything I do is amazing, and that in about six months I’ll be practically perfect in every way – I realize that this is all utter nonsense, but I’m so fond of this voice that I’ve named it THE EGOMAN – I’d always thought that everyone had this voice, but my wife, Maria, assures me that I am unique in this regard – and while she is almost always right about everything, I think that she might be mistaken on this occasion because I think that our four year old daughter may also possess this voice – the other day she was sitting on my lap and I noticed that she was looking at me strangely – “what’s that look mean?” I asked – “it means (and she paused to think for a moment) it means I think I’m better than you.” – when she said this, THE EGOMAN inside me jumped for joy – of course we had a talk about how no one is better than anyone else, but there is a part of me (the narcissistic EGOMAN part) that was very pleased by that answer – it occurred to me as I wrote this that perhaps all four year olds have an EGOMAN and that for whatever reason I failed to discard him at the appropriate time

10. Nearly everything I say (write) is probably mistaken – most of it is just plain wrong – half of it is intentional fabrication – and lots of it is just silly – as I’ve said repeatedly before: I don’t know what’s wrong with me – by the way, when you notice that I am wrong, you should tell me – it’s your moral obligation and I will do my best not to grunt too loudly as I trample on your pearls – actually, I will do my best NOT to trample on your pearls at all – I love other people’s pearls – Oink!

11. I love the show, Lost – it’s really the only thing I watch on television with any kind of regularity (which is sort of funny since it isn’t on most of the year) – I love dystopia stories and I love stories that set up the fictional answering of the BIG QUESTIONS (Who am I? Why am I here? How did I get here? What am I supposed to be doing? Etc.) – these questions aren’t easily (possibly) answerable in real life, so it’s always pleasant (for me) to have fictional characters struggling to answer them in their fictional worlds – also, sometimes in fiction the characters find answers and that’s always gratifying – in Lost, every answer leads to ten more questions – that seems about right

12. Everything is about me – even the things that aren’t about me are about me – call me self-absorbed – call me a pompous ass – call me whatever you like – it makes little difference to me because none of that has anything to do with me – I’m me and you’re you and that’s all there is to it – you can (and should) think what you like – my point is that sometimes people say, “it’s not about me” and I have to wonder, “who the hell could it possibly be about, if it’s not about me?” – or if you prefer, , “who the hell could it possibly be about, if it’s not about you?” – sometimes people will say that it’s about God – okay, I’ll grant them that, but what about me? Do I have any rights or responsibilities? If it’s not about me, then I’m off the hook – If it’s not about me, then I don’t have to worry about it (cause it’s not about me and I don’t worry about things that aren’t about me) – for instance, there are atrocities going on right now all over the world, but I don’t even know about most of them – I don’t even want to know about them b/c there’s nothing I can do about them – consequently, I choose to believe that they’re not about me – on the other hand, there are people that I love (I love them as myself) everything that does or doesn’t happen to them affects me – I want the very best for them and I will do whatever I can to make those best things happen – I take their lives personally b/c their lives are a part of my life – inasmuch as I take ownership in anything, it’s about me – I know this may not be what people mean – I actually don’t know what people mean when they say, “it’s not about me” – I think what they are saying is that it sounds selfish to say that something is about them and they don’t want to be or sound selfish – I don’t care what I sound like, for me to say that it’s not about me is selfish because it means that I’ve divorced myself from the issue – for me to say that it’s not about me is the same as me saying that I couldn’t care less and that I do not intend to give it another moment’s thought

13. I’m a nicotine junky – I love cigarettes and smoke them at every available opportunity – it’s a good thing that I’m only addicted to nicotine and not something really serious like heroine or crack b/c if I were I’d definitely be a crackwhore – obviously I’m not saying that I’d have sex with you for a cigarette, but on the other hand – how many cigarettes are we talking about?

14. I say the words “lemur” and “Albania” nearly every day

15. Despite what you may have heard, I do NOT believe in leprechauns – I do, however, believe in all sorts of other crazy shit; e.g., the immaculate conception and divinity of Christ, global warming, the possibility of general world peace, etc., but NOT leprechauns – this is not to say that if I happened upon a diminutive Irishman in a green suit I wouldn’t grab the little blagger and make him take me to his pot of gold because I would

16. I believe that God created the universe and everything in it

17. I was prompted to do this by two close friends whom I haven’t seen in what seems like decades (I really miss them both a great deal) – their lists felt profound, insightful and even occasionally moving – it’s a little bit daunting to follow lists like that and I almost didn’t even bother – but then it occurred to me that this is not a competition and that writing a bunch of random nonsense about myself is something that with which I have some experience – in the past 420 days I’ve written over 430 ten minute emails to friends which all consisted of little more than a bunch of random nonsense about myself – so even if this list ends up lacking depth and insight, I hope to make up for whatever is lacking in those areas with volume and silliness


18. I have become my wife’s de facto EGOMAN – everyone needs an EGOMAN – someone to tell you that you’re great when things aren’t working the way you’d like and you feel like shit – the crazy part is that while almost all the things the EGOMAN tells me are ridiculous fabrications and hyperbole, all the things that I say to Maria are true – she is beautiful – she is fun and exciting to spend time with – she is smart and creative – she does make our lives brighter with her presence – she is a great mommy and partner – she’s completely amazing – she takes care of our four and six year old daughters as well as a couple of other little girls during the day; she works outside the home; she’s almost completed her master’s degree; she takes on leadership roles at church; she does all the household stuff (money, shopping, cleaning – everything) – I couldn’t do half of what she typically does in a day regardless of how much time I had because I would just quit – she is so organized and efficient it makes my head swim – it’s absurd to me that this would not all seem as clear to her as it is to me, but it’s okay; I like telling her how great she is – it’s something else that I can add to the relationship that so often seems to me to be rather lopsided

19. While it may be true, as the Earl of Chesterfield wrote to his son, that “Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well,” it must be at least as true that whatever is worth doing at all, is better done poorly than not at all – this has become a sort of mantra for me (anything worth doing is better done poorly than not at all – or if you prefer the shortened version: anything is better than nothing) – I say it to myself constantly throughout the day – I suffer from a tendency toward perfection – not the useful form of perfectionism that allows some great people to achieve higher and higher levels of excellence – far from it, my particular brand of perfectionism causes me to tend to get lost in the most useless analysis of minutia making it almost impossible to complete anything – it’s the sort of perfectionism that once a flaw is discovered, it takes every bit of will that I can muster to avoid scrapping the whole thing – it’s the kind of perfectionism that causes me to freeze at the beginning of an endeavor for fear of making a mistake and ruining the whole thing – over the years (as with dealing with the accusatory voice) I’ve come up with a number of strategies to combat this stupid tendency, but the best one of all has been to intentionally accepting poor performance at the outset – to say to myself and anyone else who is willing to listen that it’s going to suck, but we have to start somewhere – next time we’ll try to make it suck a little bit less

20. I have a tendency to over-explain everything

21. I was born in Omaha, Nebraska on September 27, 1970 – I was adopted at birth and within a week, I was living with my parents – I know almost nothing about my biological parents – I have no idea what effects (if any) this has had on my personality

22. I shave my head b/c I don’t like to comb my hair

23. I am a bibliophile – I love books – I love reading them – I love owning them – I love writing in them and dog-earing their pages – I love putting them on the shelf and taking them down – I love learning new things, experiencing new thoughts, engaging in a silent debate between myself and the text – I love a good plot – I love living little bits of other lives – I not only love all these things, I love the actual, sensual physicality of the books themselves – I love owning them and having them on my shelves – I love holding and manipulating them – I love how I can hold a paperback in one hand as I eat, write, drink or smoke with the other – I love how big old books lie open on the table so that I can read them w/o touching them at all – I even love the way they smell – I love the crisp, inky aroma of the new ones and the rich musky odor of the old - I love the smoothness/roughness of each page as I turn it – I love everything about them – most of all, I love how they’ve broadened my mind and have made me a more tolerant, thoughtful, and compassionate person


24. never underestimate the value of going through the motions – this is one of those times (they come and go) when I do not feel like writing – I think that, perhaps, these are the most important times for me to write – just as it is important for me to exercise when I do not feel like exercising or grading when I do not feel like grading or spending time with my family even when I don’t feel like it, etc. – it’s all part of the discipline – I make the schedule and I put in the time – it’s what makes it possible for me to enjoy things other times – I don’t know if that made any sense – let me rephrase – if I waited till I felt like doing things, I would almost never do anything – by doing what I have a desire to do, when I’ve scheduled it, I make it possible for me to want to do it at the scheduled time at least sometimes (as opposed to never) – when I used to wait until I felt like it to write these emails, I almost never wrote any (maybe a few every few months) – since I seldom wrote, my writing didn’t improve – by writing when I’ve scheduled myself to write, whether I want to or not, I find that I want to write more often and my writing has improved

25. Nearly all of my waking hours are spent in a frenzied rush – I wake and get ready as fast as I can and am out the door as fast as I can (typically between 6 and 6:30) – I race to work as fast as I can, typically arriving at school about two hours before my first class begins – during that time, I race to get as much planning, preparation, and grading done as I possibly can (the more I do before school the less I have to do after) – in the mornings I teach three classes at a junior high (8th and 9th) after which I have exactly one hour to load up and make the 30 minute drive across town to one of the high schools where I teach 10th and 12th grade English – classes end at 4:00, after which I race home and try to productively divide my time between my family, work and myself – on Saturdays it’s the same drill (7-4) only at Wal-Mart’s Tire and Lube Express – working there is therapeutic b/c it’s very busy [I change tires and oil all day as fast as I can (and my average times are minutes faster than all of my coworkers) and then I go home] – it’s cathartic b/c it’s the opposite of what I do every other day: I don’t have to think; I don’t have to be nice; and I’m not responsible for anyone other than myself – on Sundays I sleep a little later, go to church, clean and organize the study, take a nap, go to Bible study, try to get ready for Monday and then it all begins again – I suspect that this sort of routine is not abnormal – I suspect that all of you have as much or more happening in your waking hours – in as much as this is the case, I think we all must be out of our fucking minds

HOW DID WE (I) GET HERE?

“And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself-well...how did I get here?”
(“Once In A Lifetime” lyrics by David Byrne)

So, I’m sitting here writing a blog post for random people to read and thinking, “Is this not strange?” It feels strange, but evidently it’s not – there are over 100 million blogs on the internet – roughly one for every sixty people in the world – that makes what I’m doing now far more ordinary than, say, owning a bird or eating pizza (and I thought that I was being unique and interesting – too bad) – whenever something seems strange, but turns out to be ordinary, one has to ask, “How did we get here?” I’ve been thinking about technology a bit lately, and not just because I’m using it to write to strangers on the internet – in fact, that’s not what I’ve been thinking about at all – rather, I’ve been thinking about a much more fundamental set of technologies such as food, shelter, and clothing – it started when I began reading The Road, by Cormic McCarthy. In the book, a father and son are traveling south, down a highway, in a post-apocalyptic world – the majority of the text is spent on them trying to avoid starvation, hypothermia, and murder (by the other survivors in the post-apocalyptic world) – the book was quite well-written (it won the Pulitzer) and it started me thinking about all the things we take for granted. Soon after I finished it, I went on a solo hiking trip. I wasn’t in danger of starvation, hypothermia, or murder, but I was uncomfortably cold – all of my water was frozen solid and I had great difficulty even breaking it into chunks small enough to thaw with my stove – similarly, we’ve been in the midst of an ice storm this week – everyone lost power for a while – some people still don’t have power – and again, I started to think about technology and all the things we take for granted – the same basic things: food, shelter, electricity, and heat.

The human species has been around for a while – something like 200,000 to 400,000 years – most of those years were spent in a manner much more similar to the experiences of the father and son in The Road than anything I’ve ever experienced. According to Steven Pinker, “For ninety-nine percent of human existence, people lived as foragers in small nomadic bands” (How the Mind Works 42). It’s difficult to imagine, but even if we take the more conservative estimate of around 200,000 years and consider that humans only began to develop agriculture around 10,000 years ago – that means there were more than 190,000 years that our species spent doing little more than trying to find food and trying not to become food – personally, I’ve never had to search for food – neither have I ever (to my knowledge) been in danger of being eaten (or even killed for that matter – that is, if you exclude my daily highway time which I think it best never to consider too closely – evidently, cars kill two people every minute) – my point is that while what I’m doing here may not be all that uncommon, it is a least a little bit extraordinary – in fact, nearly everything about our lives in the U.S. at present is a little bit extraordinary when we think about it in terms of the rest of human history. Think about it, at least 200,000 years of basically no changes in the way people were living. Put that (basically no changes in the way people were living for 200,00 years) in the context of the changes that have occurred during the last 200 years or even just the 20th century. In the context of 200,000 years, no one even came up with a method of writing till around 5000 years ago – we’ve only had books for about a thousand years and ordinary people have only had access to them for a couple of hundred years – we’ve only had cars and planes for around 100 years – is this not amazing to you (in light of at least 200,000 years of basically no changes in the way people were living)? I can’t stress this enough: we are living in a very weird (clean, safe, easy – as opposed to “nasty, brutish, and short”) time and place – weirdness is always a result of change (old weirdness becomes comfortably mundane) and like the expanding universe, the length, breadth, and pace of the change in our world is rapidly accelerating.

This is a post with a job to do – if you think of the last post as a sort-of disclamatory preface, you can view this post as a introduction, thinking about how I’ve come to be here writing this post and considering what I wish to accomplish in posts to come – in light of human history, it could be viewed as odd that I’m sitting here at all instead of foraging for food with the rest of my small nomadic band of compatriots – in light of my personal history, it could be considered equally odd because I possess little affinity and even less aptitude for using a computer – thinking back to the context of the last 200,000 years, this whole personal computer thing has only just taken place during my lifetime – I distinctly remember my first computer experiences (I doubt my daughters will be able to say anything remotely similar). It was in the 4th grade (1980) and I was ten years old. In the school library there were a couple of Apple II computers. They had green screens with big rectangular cursers. I remember playing Oregon Trail and some sort of fish game on them. Is it not crazy to have moved from that to this in 28 years? – sometime around then my uncle bought an Atari 2600 – again, everything was rectangular – remember pong? – that was a big deal – who would have guessed that we would end up where we are today? After fourth grade, I don’t think that I used another computer until 8th grade – again, it was mostly about games – they did try to teach us some programming basics, but honestly I didn’t learn anything – it was another four years before I used a personal computer again – this time it was the word processers in the computer lab when we were seniors – so, quick review: I used a computer in 4th grade to play games – I used a computer in 8th grade to play games – and I used a computer in 12th grade to type papers. I also used computers to type papers in college and that’s basically it (there was this accounting class, but the less said about that the better). So, from 1980 to 1998, all I used computers for is to play games and type papers. [Interesting note: I was standing in the office at junior high where I work – on the counter there was an electric typewrite with the cover on it – a student asked, “what’s that?” – the secretary said, “it’s a typewriter” – the student asked, “what’s a typewriter?” – the secretary said, “it’s what we used before computers to type papers” – the student crinkled his nose and asked, “when was that – the 50s?”]

In 1998, I started teaching high school English and had to learn about email. I’d heard of email before. In college there were people who talked about email and the internet, but the first time that I even saw the internet was during my student teaching – I wasn’t very impressed – the computers were slow and it didn’t seem like there was anything there worth my time – obviously, in the last ten years a lot has changed – computers and connections are faster – the internet’s better and all of us (I assume) must use email all the time – even so, for years I only used the computer for work – sometime after the millennium, I started to occasionally receive and send personal emails – most of mine were the sort of single sentence replies I now receive so often from my friends. Then in the summer of 2003, a close friend of mine from high school called me out of the blue (I think he’d found my number in an old date book and decided to try it) – we’d lost contact for over six years – he also had contact info. for other friends – I vowed not to lose touch with them again – also around that time, other dear friends of ours from college moved to Spain – similarly, a close friend from college was living all over the place (Amsterdam, Hawaii, Slovinia, India) – I decided that a semi-regular group email would allow me to maintain contact, so sometime in 2003 I started writing – at that point it was a semi-monthly thing, but as I was writing, more and more people were added to the list and it became more fun to write – in 2005, I started to try to write a group email nearly every day – I made some simple rules for myself: these rules included one that stated that I only had to write for ten minutes and another that stated that I didn’t have to think about grammar, mechanics, or usage – no editing – just write it and send it – these rules (especially the two listed above) were extremely liberating and it made writing much easier – last year (2008) I made it a goal to write at least one ten minute entry for each day of the year – I ended up writing 376 entries – some of them weren’t too bad. Similarly, these posts are mostly written in ten minute chunks with very little thought given to the rules of grammar, mechanics, or usage.

I believe in the power of writing – I believe that it has the power to shape our thoughts and transform our lives and I’ve been trying to write daily for decades, but it never worked – I lacked the discipline to do it and without an audience, my writing tends to degenerate into platitudes and pontification – something about the method I used in 2008 made the whole thing actually work for the first time and the success was inspiring enough to make me want to try something new – as I’ve mentioned, the friends I’ve been emailing have been telling me that I ought to write a blog (which may be a nice way of saying, “stop sending us all these bloody emails”) – before the 2008 success, it just seemed pointless – but now it has begun to seem interesting – I have no delusions of grandeur – as far as I know, only four or five people (including myself) have read the first post, but this sort of anonymity is rather liberating. I can write about whatever I want without worrying about alienating my audience (because there really isn’t one). This, I suppose, brings me to the point where I ought to introduce what I intend to do with this year’s ten remaining entries.

Sometime in 2004 (or 2005 – I can’t remember), during a period when I was not writing, I received an email from my friend in Spain – he asked how I was doing – I responded that I was great – he asked what was so great about being alive in my shoes and I rattled off a smart ass top ten list of what was so great about being alive in my shoes – this silly list inspired me to write a bunch of emails elaborating on the list – and every time after that when there had been a writing lapse (and there were many, many writing lapses), when I would start up again, I would begin with the top ten list – I used it for years – I used it all the way into January 2008 and then I ceased to have writing lapses and I don’t use it anymore – I love the top ten list because it reminds me of how good my life is and this seems like a good place to retire it. It’s changed over time from the original smart ass bit to a more legitimate list of what is really great about my life. The following is the present list:

TOP TEN BEST PARTS OF BEING ALIVE IN MY. . . . SHOES:
#10 WORK: WAL-MART TIRE & LUBE EXPRESS AND TEACHING
#9 OUR CHURCH
#8 INTERNET (FOR EMAIL, SHOPPING, AND WHATHAVEYOU)
#7 THE SHED
#6 LEGAL DRUGS (CAFFEINE, NICOTINE, PHARMACEUTICALS, ETC…)
#5 THE INTANGIBLE ECSTASY OF MAXNESS
#4 BOOKS
#3 FAMILY, FRIENDS, EASE, COMFORT, ETC…….
#2 MARIA, AURORA, AND VIVIAN
#1 GOD (THROUGH WHOM ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE)