#9 OUR CHURCH, PART II:

NOTE: I wrote the following over three years ago. I don’t exactly feel this way any more, but a lot of people do.

All things dull and ugly,
All creatures short and squat,
All things rude and nasty,
The Lord God made the lot.

Each little snake that poisons,
Each little wasp that stings,
He made their brutish venom.
He made their horrid wings.

All things sick and cancerous,
All evil great and small,
All things foul and dangerous,
The Lord God made them all.

Each nasty little hornet,
Each beastly little squid--
Who made the spikey urchin?
Who made the sharks? He did!

All things scabbed and ulcerous,
All pox both great and small,
Putrid, foul and gangrenous,
The Lord God made them all.Amen (MONTY PYTHON)

SO TODAY´S TOPIC IS #9 OUR CHURCH – I’ve decided that church is sort of like going to the track or the bingo parlor or the casino – I’ve never actually been to any of those places (so this is mostly BS), but I assume that people go to them for three basic reasons: 1) to socialize, 2) to be entertained, and 3) to get a little something to take home with them (i.e. to win) – I think that most people go to church for the some reasons – these, however, are not the reasons that I go to church – I do not really enjoy the social atmosphere at churches and I am not at all entertained (except slightly, in the most masochistic way, by my own discomfort) by anything having to do with church – I do occasionally get something out of the sermon (a little something to take home with me), but that is not why I go to church – the fact is that I only go to church b/c it’s so extremely important to my wife that I go – I have to confess that I am not at all sure why she goes to church or why it is so immensely imperative that I go – it’s not that I haven’t asked her or that she hasn’t told me, it simply that when she answers me, it’s like she’s speaking in another language (maybe it’s the Holy Spirit) – she talks about not forsaking the assembly as in "Let us not forsake the assembling of ourselves together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another, and all the more as you see the Day (of Jesus' Return) approaching." (Hebrews 10:25) -- she talks about Christian fellowship, instruction, and accountability -- she talks about having a like-minded group of people around to help us socialize our daughters (I actually understand and agree with that one) – but the other two are completely lost on me – call me what you will, church just seems like such a tremendous waste of time to me – why cant I just get a copy of the semon notes or the audio recording – okay, that’s enough venting – the fact is that I don’t really have much of a choice in the matter, so I might as well make the best of it – of all the churches I’ve been to in my life, I like ours the best – which is how it makes it on the list – it could be so much worse – I’ve been to so much worse – I’ve spent years in so much worse – i grew up in so much worse – so it could be so much worse, but instead it’s only a mild nuisance surrounded by wonderful people and an excellent pastor – that’s why it’s on the list of the best parts of my life – going to my church (for me, every week) is like going to the doctor thinking that you have cancer and expecting chemotherapy and instead finding out that you only have a hernia – it’s not what you wanted, but it’s a hell of a lot better than it could have been – as always, feel free to respond with ridicule, sincerity, silliness, or whathaveyou
max

#9 OUR CHURCH, PART I:

TOP TEN BEST PARTS OF BEING ALIVE IN MY. . . . SHOES:#9 OUR CHURCH, PART I:

I grew up in a “Christian” home – my parents are Christians and have always been very involved in church – I asked Jesus to “come into my heart” when I was four and again when I was six – I attended church, AWANA, Sunday school, and even Sunday night services regularly throughout the years I lived with my parents and even went to three Evangelical Free Church National Youth Conferences and missions trip – somehow none of this seemed to have a significant long-term effect on my thinking or behavior – I would feel convicted, vow to change, and then eventually I just gave up – I couldn’t be godly or even good -- it was impossible – I didn’t want to be good (I wanted to get laid) – I didn’t want to be godly – I didn’t really even know what any of that stuff meant – my parents were good and godly, but they seemed like aliens from outer space – I couldn’t be like them – I’d tried and it was impossible – I didn’t even want to be like them anymore – I was tired of felling guilty and bad about myself all of the time, so finally I just said “fuck it – I’m me and that’s all there is to it – I can’t change – I don’t even want to change – I’m just going to have to learn to be fine being myself” – so by the time I left home for college, I’d basically given up on the whole religion thing – my parents sent me to Trinity College in Deerfield, Illinois – when people asked, I claimed to be an agnostic or occasionally an atheist (it was so fun to watch their little fundamentalist jaws drop when I said that) – I decided that no one can really know anything for sure about God or the existence of God and Christians were just fooling themselves – in February of 1991, during the spring semester of my sophomore year, I found myself in the deepest most anguished depression of my life – everything that I’d cared about had fallen apart, and I couldn’t think of a single reason to go on living – it was at this point, during a walk alone (smoking obviously) late one night that God spoke to me – he told me that he existed; that he loved me; and that if I would seek him, he would reveal himself to me (have I ever mentioned this to any of you? I typically don’t bring this up b/c it still seems pretty fucking crazy) – when I returned to the dorm feeling numb and slightly insane, Lee Hildebrand (I wonder if Connie still knows him), a student who lived next door, came out of his room and handed me a book – he said that he’d been praying just then and had felt like he needed to pray for me and then he felt like he needed to find me and give me this book (I’d just walked into our suite) – I went back into his room – the book was Tired of Trying to Measure Up by Jeff Vanvonderen -- I went into my room and climbed up onto my bunk and read the whole thing that night – I don’t really remember anything specific about the book (I ought to reread it), but one thing sticks out: I had thought that I was supposed to try to be good and try not to be bad – it turns out that the fact that I couldn’t do this is the whole point of Christ coming to earth – no one can do and trying to is pointless – so my earlier conclusions were right, it was just my response that was wrong – instead of just giving up, I needed to trust Christ to change me – I decided to do that right then (I didn’t have anything to lose) – I decided to trust Christ to change me and he has been, little by little, and he’s still doing it as all those who know me can affirm – Paul talks about this very thing – the allowing Christ to change him and make him more like Christ through faith in Philippians 3:12-16:

Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.
All of us who are mature should take such a view of things. And if on some point you think differently, that too God will make clear to you. Only let us live up to what we have already attained.

Not much happened in my mind and behavior after that, until in November 1992 when I started trying to have a daily Bible study. This is when God’s real work in my life started making a significant difference in the way I think and act – it’s God who is making the changes in my life, but studying Scripture and prayer are the are the primary ways that I’ve found to position myself in a place where I can be changed – this is the easy yoke that Christ mentions in Matthew 11:30 – it’s his responsibility to change me, but it’s my responsibility to allow myself to be changed.

EPILOGUE

TOP TEN BEST PARTS OF BEING ALIVE IN MY. . . . SHOES:
#10 WORK: WAL-MART TIRE & LUBE EXPRESS AND TEACHING, PART IX:

So one might ask, “How did work manage to be one of the top ten things about your life?”
All I can say is that it beats the alternatives and I feel very blessed to have a profession and a job that are seldom tedious and often engaging. We lack nothing. If anything we have too much. Life is good. My time at Wal-Mart is coming to a close. Today, Maria (my wife) mentioned that I ought to think about quitting by the end of the year. I’m not quite ready yet. We’re paying off a credit card and a grad. school loan and there are a few things I’d like to purchase before I leave. There’s a wool jacket I’d like to have. There’s a giant leather journal. And I’d also like to buy a bike and maybe a bike for Maria. After that, I ought to be ready to quit. Although, who knows, maybe I’ll quit this Saturday. That’s always been the wonderful thing about my time at Wal-Mart – we’d be fine without it. Quitting is always an option.

SATURDAYS AT WAL-MART

So I began working at the Wal-Mart TLE in June of 2004. At the beginning of August, it was time to get ready for school to resume, so I turned in my two-week’s notice. When I did so, my manager asked if I could perhaps handle an evening or two or maybe a day during the weekend. I was still worried about money, so I agreed. But as I began teaching and working two weeknight evenings and Saturday, I begun to get behind with my planning and grading, so at the start of September, I turned in my two-week’s notice again. This time, they asked if I could just work Saturdays from 7 to 4. At first I said no, but the more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me that I’m essentially worthless at home on Saturdays. I figured that as long as I’m not worth a shit, I might as well be getting paid for it, so I agreed. I’ve been working Saturdays ever since.

HOW I ENDED UP WORKING AT WALMART

[This isn't a photo of my TLE, but as you undoubtedly know, they are all very similar. Perhaps I'll try to take a picture of my own before the next post.]

TOP TEN BEST PARTS OF BEING ALIVE IN MY. . . . SHOES:

#10 WORK: WAL-MART TIRE & LUBE EXPRESS AND TEACHING, PART VII:

In the spring of 2004, my wife, Maria, resigned from her teaching position because our second daughter was about to be born. We’d discussed our various options and it turned out that two considerations overruled the rest: Maria really wanted to stay home with our children full-time, and the cost of childcare was prohibitive. Were Maria to continue working, the vast majority of her salary would be going to pay for childcare and the bit that was left simply wasn’t enough to make her efforts to work outside the home worth it especially since she didn’t want to.
For my part, I began to feel the weight of this decision almost immediately. Our income had been cut in half and as soon as our second child was born our responsibilities would double or triple or quadruple – who can measure that kind of thing? Thus I began to feel the fear. I was about to become the sole breadwinner and we didn’t have any real saving to speak of. What if something went wrong? I decided that I needed to find a second job and use my earning from it to create an emergency fund. I began looking for work that May. I’d worked construction before and figured that doing that again was probably the most efficient way to make some quick cash. Construction pays well for short term work and they are always looking for extra help in the summer. Everyone I talked to, however, while they were very interested, said that they could use me but not until July. I was thinking that I needed work right away. I was teaching at the time and I really only had a two month window in which to work. I couldn’t wait until July. Even if I made a few dollars less doing something other than construction, working two months rather than one would end up being more money overall.
I applied at Wal-Mart on a whim. I was at Wal-Mart and it occurred to me that I ought to just pick up an application. Wal-Mart doesn’t do things that way, however. They have little computer terminals set up where you have to apply and take a bunch of little application tests. I figure that as long as I was there, I may as well just do it. They called me the next day and a couple of days after that I was hired. When the human resources lady asked me to choose from a list of departments with openings, I asked which one paid the most. She told me that the Tire and Lube Express paid the most; I told he that’s the one I wanted.

I COULDN'T ASK FOR A BETTER GIG

TOP TEN BEST PARTS OF BEING ALIVE IN MY. . . . SHOES:
#10 WORK: WAL-MART TIRE & LUBE EXPRESS AND TEACHING, PART VI:

“He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.” (George Bernard Shaw, “Maxims for Revolutionists)

Some teachers take offense at this statement, but I happen to be a big fan of Shaw and I think that in a sense his statement is probably accurate. I once heard someone say that when choosing a profession, you ought to find something that you would enjoy doing even if you didn’t get paid for it. There are a multitude of things that I do for enjoyment, principally reading and writing. I also enjoy interesting discussions, thinking about things, learning, backpacking, spending time with my family, but nobody’s going to pay me for doing these things in the way that I enjoy doing them and I have very little interest in doing them in such a way that I might get paid for it. In the areas of reading and writing; while I love doing these things, I simply am not efficient or proficient enough to get paid for them. To put Shaw’s statement in perspective if I were a better writer, I would do that for a living. Since I’m not, I teach writing instead. There’s nothing degrading about that. I’m a better writing than most, but I’m not as good as Shaw or Heller or even Rowling. I, am however, skilled at teaching uninterested and unwilling adolescents how to organize their ideas into words on a page in a way that a reader can understand. That, I’m certain, is a reasonably impressive skill and it hasn’t been easy to attain and I’m still honing it.

I didn’t know it when I began (those first years were rather difficult and unpleasant), but it turns out that teaching adolescents to read, write, and think more proficiently is probably the perfect job for me. Perhaps the best feature of teaching is that one never arrives. There’s always room and urgent need for improvement. I will never be good enough. My students will never improve enough. There will always be more to do and more that I should have done and I find this fact extremely motivating and inspiring. That statement is not redundant. I am frequently inspired but rarely motivated. My students need me each minute of every class period and I can’t let them down. I am seldom motivated to this extent in other areas of my life. The urgency of the school year energizes me. We have so much to do and so little time. I love it. Even now, just writing about it, I’m getting a little excited.

When I think of all the people who are unhappy with their lives and their work, I think that I must be a very lucky man to have fallen into a profession that is both motivating and inspiring. I’ve had jobs where I dreaded going to work and couldn’t wait to leave. Teaching isn’t like that at all. There just isn’t time for those sorts of thoughts. On the way to work I’m thinking about what we’ll be doing. Throughout the day, I am focus on my student and their work. And on the way home, I’m reflecting on what we did and how it could have been better. I couldn’t ask for a better gig.

TEACHING ENGLISH

TOP TEN BEST PARTS OF BEING ALIVE IN MY. . . . SHOES:
#10 WORK: WAL-MART TIRE & LUBE EXPRESS AND TEACHING, PART V:

“Want to be a ticket taker?
Want to be a pizza maker?
Lobsterman – Jockey – TV fixer – Ballet dancer – Soda mixer
Do you want to be an astronaut?
Or keeper of the zoo?
You’ve got to do something.
What DO you want to do?” (Theodor Seuss Geisel)

Let’s face it, unless you’ve somehow managed to become independently wealthy or have somehow found someone to provide for you, you have to work. Most of us must work and work a lot to earn our bread. In fact, most of us will spend the vast majority of our adult waking hours at work or working. I’ve been working for twenty-six years and for the past twelve years, at least during the school year, I’ve been working seven days a week. For the past six years, along with teaching, I’ve been changing tires and oil for Wal-Mart’s Tire and Lube Express. Sometime in my mid-twenties, it occurred to me that I was going to be spending most of my time working and since that was the case, I’d better try to find a profession that I would enjoy or at least be something worth while. I tried to come up with some criteria toward that end and ended up with a rather long list of what I wanted and didn’t want. When I looked closely at the list, I started to recognize categories, for instance, a number of items on the list had to do with the work being worth while. I organized all the criteria into various categories. I can’t remember all of the categories anymore, but I remember the gist: whatever it was, the work needed to be worthwhile, almost never tedious, and always a challenge. A couple of years later, I decided to become a high school English teacher.

A NEW CHAPTER

TOP TEN BEST PARTS OF BEING ALIVE IN MY. . . . SHOES:
#10 WORK: WAL-MART TIRE & LUBE EXPRESS AND TEACHING, PART IV:
It’s been a busy month. There are six more school days until we are all free. My wife had an interview last Thursday, and it looks like she’ll be teaching again next year. For the last six years, she’s been home with our beautiful daughters. Next year they’ll both be going to public school. With two professional incomes, it looks like I’ll be ending my time at Wal-Mart. It’ll be a bit sad to go in some ways, but at the same time, working six days a week for the past six years wasn’t all that fun. We’re entering a new chapter of our lives. It’ll be interesting to see what it’s like.

OUT OF OUR MINDS

TOP TEN BEST PARTS OF BEING ALIVE IN MY. . . . SHOES:#10 WORK: WAL-MART TIRE & LUBE EXPRESS AND TEACHING, PART III:
I wrote this last year, but it’s still basically true.
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

LIGHT WORK

TOP TEN BEST PARTS OF BEING ALIVE IN MY. . . . SHOES:
#10 WORK: WAL-MART TIRE & LUBE EXPRESS AND TEACHING, PART II:
In the summer after my 10th grade year I worked a very peculiar job. It was once again the result of my mother’s efforts to turn me in to a productive human being. She was the human resources director at a large department store and they needed a couple of temporary workers to change all of the florescent lighting tubes in the entire building. Evidently the lights were changing the color of the clothes. The farmer I’d been working for the summer before had decided that he wasn’t making enough money and was leasing his land and working for FedEx instead. The job at the department store was going to take a little over a month and I’d be working nights from 8:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. It was my first night job and it had the extra bonus of allowing me to meet and work with an ex-con. He’d just been released form prison and his brother was one of the all-night maintenance guys at the store. This was the mid-80s, so he had long heavy metal hair and black heavy metal T-shirts. He was an idiot. He’d complain every night about how his girlfriend wouldn’t fuck him because she’d just had a baby and it hurt too much. It was a real cultural experience for me. It only occurs to me now that my mother may have hired me with something of a supervisorial role in mind. I remember that she’d told me of the trouble that they’d had with the night workers. Evidently some of the people who they’d hired in the past had been caught asleep, drunk, or stoned on the job. This guy I was working with didn’t try any of those things but he was obnoxious and lazy. He’d constantly run his mouth and regularly want to stop to smoke a cigarette. I tried to ignore him on these occasions and just keep moving the ladder and changing lights without him. I suspect that even at that point in my life I knew that the time would go by infinitely faster if we were working. Eventually, I lost patience with his constant babbling and lack of effort. I was beginning to get angry with him and finally said, “Why don’t you just shut up and do your fucking job! It’s not like this is difficult. We’re just changing fucking lights.” At that point, I really wanted to kick his ass and all I needed for an excuse was for him to attack me, but he didn’t. He just got really angry and the angrier he got, the faster he worked. After that, we got along a lot better.

PINING FOR THE FIELDS

TOP TEN BEST PARTS OF BEING ALIVE IN MY. . . . SHOES:
#10 WORK: WAL-MART TIRE & LUBE EXPRESS AND TEACHING:
I got my first job when in 1984 working as a roguer/detasseler for a local seed corn company. I was thirteen and we’d just moved to Grand Island, Nebraska. I’d spent a week or two on the couch watching TV and my mother decided that I needed something to do, so she got me a job. It was not a pleasant job. My mother would drop me off at a farm before sunrise and I’d stand there with a bunch of other teens I didn’t know. Then the busses would arrive. Everyone had a crew assignment. So you got on the bus with your crew. The crew bosses were high school kids and the crews were mostly junior high and high school boys, not many girls. As you can imagine, it was often a lot like Lord of the Flies. We would be driven out to a cornfield and get off the bus. It was often still dark when we arrived. Our job during the first part of the summer was roguing, which means cutting out unwanted plants with a hoe or a knife. It was really easy at the beginning of the summer when the corn was short, but as the corn got taller the job became more and more evil. To begin with, even during the warmest parts of the year, it’s chilly in the morning in Nebraska. The corn field catches all the moisture from the air as it cools, so when you enter a field at dawn, you can’t go ten feet without being drenched to the bone. The serious roguer/detasselers wore rain suits. The rest of us soon began to bring garbage bags. One would be worn on top like a medieval tunic and the other around the waist like a skirt. It was wet and around forty degrees Fahrenheit. I remember skinny little kids coming out of the rows with blue lips and pruney fingers shivering uncontrollably in the early hours after sunrise. As the day progressed, the field would become warmer and warmer, so that by midday the temperature might be around 100 degrees and field was like a sauna. As you walked down the rows with bare arms, you’d notice some mild discomfort as the leaves brushed your skin and then when you got to the end of the row and stood in line to be assigned another row, you notice what looked like a thousand tiny paper cuts on your arms. These things, by the way were the more enjoyable parts of the job. I haven’t mentioned the mud or the bugs or the random brutality that took place in the field where no one could see what one adolescent boy did to another. Many a skinny, little kid came out of the rows bruised and bleeding. Believe it or not, I did the same job the next summer. It was a lot easier. I was bigger and knew more people. The summer after that, I worked for a farmer keeping his irrigation wells going. It was still in the corn field, but much easier – more responsibility and more money. My mom had put me to work to get me off the couch, but the money made it worth it. I made nearly a thousand dollars that first summer and a similar amount every summer after that. Enough money, so that I never really had to think about money until much later in life. I’d kinda promised myself that I’d never work in the fields again, but I was mistaken. The summer after my freshman year of college, I found myself working for another seed corn company at their research and testing facility. It was a job very similar to my first except now I was counting corn plants for yield trials. The idea was that they were testing the yields (how many seeds per ear of corn) of various strains of corn. In order to do this, they’d planted whole fields full of test plots. Each plot was supposed to consist of two rows of twelve plants each. It was our job to cut out the extra plants. To say that it was monotonous would be an incredible understatement. We counted corn for eight to ten hours a day, six days a week. I started dreaming all night that I was counting corn only to wake the next morning to have to dress and drive to work to count some more corn. Again, this was actually the best part of the job because as the corn developed tassels, they began to have us self-pollinate plants. I’ll try to describe what this was. The first thing we had to do was slid a tiny paper sack (rather like a white paper condom) over the ear of corn in the early stages of its development. This was to make sure that it did not get pollinated. Later, as the tassels began to appear we would take a paper bag (rather like the ones they put your single bottle of wine in) and put it carefully over the tassel and make a neat little fold at the bottom and paperclip it (this was to make sure that no pollen escaped the bag). A day or two later, I would come by and take the tassel bag and whack it against my free hand and pull it off, then yank off the ear bag, and put the tassel bag over the ear and staple it (this was how we self-pollinated the plants). I know that this does not sound too bad and it wasn’t at first. In fact, at first it was a pleasant change after counting corn for a month, but then the pace picked up. The tassels on individual plants tend to come at roughly the same time. At first there are just a few, but then little by little, there are more and more and more and they all have to be bagged right away. Thus our days began to get longer and our days off fewer until we worked 34 days in a row with an average of ten hour days. There was one day when we worked 18 hours self-pollinating plants as fast as we could. We couldn’t go home until we were done. At the end of each day we’d come in from the field, sunburned and covered in pollen. There’s nothing more itchy than pollen, but if you scratch it, it burrows into your skin and give you a painful, welty rash. At the end of that summer, I was done with working in the field, hopefully forever.

NO ONE EXPECTS YOU TO READ THESE POSTS

“DISCLAIMER #4: No one expects you to read these posts. I’m sure that I never will. In fact most people don’t. More than six billion people do not read these posts. Of course, if you don’t read these posts (every word – more than once) you are probably a bad, selfish, and naughty person. I’m sure I am. But no one expects you to read these posts” [from the December 31, 2008 post]

When I began thinking about writing a blog in December of 2008, 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 each month in which to write each post. While I did manage to post twelve entries, most of them were borrowed from things I’d already written. I’d originally intended the blog to contain all new material, but I became busy and distracted and (as has happened once again) I would find myself at the end of the month without having written anything and all but completely apathetic about it. It turns out that it probably didn’t matter because nobody reads any of this anyway. That’s not entirely true. It turns out that I like reading these posts and I have a couple of friends who have read some of them. But on the whole, no one reads them. This should not come as a surprise. There are more than 100 million blogs out there; one can’t read them all. But if I tend to put off writing it and nobody reads it, why am I doing it? Last January, I wrote:

“my thought is to make it a goal to write at least 12 entries (aiming at one a month) – if I find that this experiment serves some useful purpose, e.g., improves my writing, generates interesting discussion, leads to useful feedback, or produces some other completely unforeseen, positive outcome; then I’ll continue on next year with a more rigorous plan – if not, then I will be able to say that I once wrote a blog and surely that must count for something”

To be honest, I assumed that if no one read it I would quit. But it turns out that I don’t want to. In fact, I’ve even begun two more blogs (one devoted to the Tao Te Ching and the other devoted to Lint). It turns out that I like seeing what I’ve written when it appears on the screen in the context of the blog. As someone who writes, I find that one of the best things in the world is to have people read and respond to what I’ve written. Next best is to see what I’ve written in print (on paper in a publication) where people could read it if they wanted to. The blog, somehow, feels almost like that (even though I know nobody reads it). It turns out that I like to read it. I also like to Google it and see the items pop up on the screen. Somehow, seeing my words on the screen in the context of the blog makes them seem more substantial. I suspect that this is why there are over 100 million blogs out there and I suspect that the fact that no one reads them is why there are so many blogs that are eventually abandoned. For the present, I’ve decided not to abandon the blog. It’s fun and fun is its own reward. But I do want to try to find a way to get myself to actually write new posts (as opposed to recycling stuff I’ve written before).

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 in response. This silly list inspired me to write a bunch of emails elaborating on the list (for the past five or six years I’ve been writing a daily group email to friends). 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)

There were a number of times last year when I intended to use the TOP TEN LIST for blog posts, but I never got around to it. This year, what I intend to do is just write my way there. In other words, in February, after I’ve completed the Tao blog posts, I’ll start writing about work every day until I finish it. That’s the only way I know of to get myself to write new material.