48 hours left

less than 3 days left and it's going to be 2006. incredible.
i've never really been a big huge fan of new years. for the past 2-3 years i went to bed at around 10 pm, on new years eve. anyway, it's amazing how the years just fly by. call me an odd-ball, but i find comfort in staying home with family. and i find even more comfort in being in bed at 10 pm while everybody else is out partying or watching people party on television. i find security in it somehow, being cozy under the covers when the clock strikes midnight, and you hear fireworks and gunshots and screaming and cheering outside. it's going to be the same thing for 2005. did i just say all that?? man i'm getting old!

on a side note i really need a hair-cut. but i really feel too lazy to get one. so i think im just going to let it grow a little more. also, i really really wish i had a cute, soft, cuddly little puppy right now.

a new discovery made

you know that feeling of discovering something, like a revealing explanation to a mystery, or an answer to a riddle, or something new about a person you know?

well, i just discovered something like that. it is something about myself. it's as if i've been hiding from myself, or hiding in denial. it's also pretty creepy, kinda like the movie Hide and Seek.

i learned that i tend to give the cold-shoulder. not exactly betray, or desert, or abandon. but more like ignore, channel out, and evade. i'm not going to cop out on this and say that i'm misunderstood, because this can be understood. i think as usual, i can trace the roots to this newly discovered trait of mine to selfishness, self-centeredness, and pride.

i've been feeling the effects of this lately. after knowing this truth about me, all of my pains now suddenly have an origin, and i can finally understand and finally accept the fact that i am fully deserving of the said pains.

jasmine soap

i went to a chinese market a couple of days ago. i got some ice cream (mochi) and a bar of jasmine soap for 50 cents. this morning i took a shower with this 50 cent soap. it smelled okay, kinda sorta like jasmine. but when i got to work i noticed that i smelled funny. i wreaked of B.O. it's like some kind of trick soap or something. next time you see a bar of soap claiming to leave you smelling like wonderful jasmine, just simply walk away.

i am tired

i'm tired. tired of looking at computers all day. tired of working in general. tired of stopping at traffic lights. tired of being the only one who uses turn signals. tired of buying petroleum. tired of waiting at the petrol pump watching the dollars go up.

i'm too tired of thinking about things; like oil changes, paying bills, and relationships. too tired am i, of living in dallas. too tired of not fitting well in any place. too tired of being misunderstood and being misread.

the straws i hold in my hand are few now. and the pages of this book are coming to an end. i long for stability. i long for comfort. i long for consistency. i want discernment. i want trust. i want honesty. i want transparency. but it looks like i won't be finding them any time soon.

i am tired.

jotting it down.

a good friend suggests that i write what is on my heart. you know, the stuff that sits heavy on your heart. you know what i mean, we all have 'em, every now and then.

within a timespan of less than 24 hours, i am reminded of something that i must learn to never doubt. in the midst of bad things i am finally able to feel some sense of peace. it is midnight now, way past my bedtime. i bet i'll sleep better tonight than i've had in a while.

this sense of peace comes directly from the knowledge that my God is a faithful God. And He cares for me more than anything.

sponge

they say everything you need to know you learned in kindergarten. back in my days of kindergarten i learned that pointing at somebody leaves you pointing back at yourself with 3 fingers. remember that old saying?

i dont know if i learn slow (which is certainly true with mathematics) but i do know that i learn by example/experience best. so let me tell you, briefly, that "what comes around goes around". it's not entirely unlike kharma. even if your intentions are innocent (or simply have no preconceived intentions) it just might come back and bite you (or kiss you?).

now this action/reaction is not what is bothering me. it itself is not why im being stabbed over and over again. it is the fact that the guilty party must live with it for the rest of life. i can easily imagine how a murderer feels, sometime after the fact, when he/she inevitably goes through remorse. because i swear to God i feel like one right now. such feelings of grief, i can also imagine, is what facilitates the entertaining idea of "killing" the self.

but i suppose its the majority (or the few?) that never "crosses that line". yah probably. but im really an optimist at heart. i really am. i've dug quite a depressingly impressive hole. i started out with a shovel and somehow ended up with dynamite. all i am seeking now is to get out of this hole, to reach the surface and to take in fresh air. i don't even care what the weather is like. if the sun is out, full, strong, and warm, caught up in a blue sky - that would be a bonus i don't deserve. but if it's a dreary day, out there on the surface, beyond this hole, then that would be fine too.

being real

call it a shortcoming. call it selfishness. call it pride or call it insecurity. call it whatever you wish.

but i've learned a big lesson. i learned it many many a days ago. but im just now starting to comprehend it. just now am i beginning to grasp it.

i used to fear what the world thinks of me. i used to be too scared to show the world my feelings, and of course my feelings for others.

since that moment of growth however i don't care what people think of me anymore. i mean i really don't. and neither am i afraid to reveal my attractions and display what i will call Love.

have you ever had reoccuring nightmares?
have you ever had a nightmare because of something you did to a friend?
ever had a nightmare due to a deep and sorrowful regret?
you ever had nightmares of never being forgiven?
have you had a nightmare about never having the chance to ask for forgiveness?
what about guilt? ever had a nightmare because of some hideous crime?
ever had a nightmare from which you've woken up feeling pain because you're tearing up inside?
and have you ever had a nightmare that bothers you even during the day when you're awake?

end of my lease.

January 31, 2006. that is the date when my apartment rental lease is up. i signed off this morning to confirm that i am not extending. this roach motel (apartment) can burn in hades. to be truthful though, this place wasn't bad. and there aren't nearly as many roaches as i make it out to be. we're doing a good job keeping it clean and bug free. but i will forever associate the kitchen with a war zone. the war i had a few months ago with the roaches is carved into the cerebral cortex of my brain. i am a war veteran and i deserve a medal, or something.

the killer raquet.

i used to be a pretty mean tennis player. not mean mean, but good mean. but im not talking about tennis raquets here. im talking the killing raquet - racquets designed to kill with a a discharge of electric shock!

so a friend gave me this killer racquet for Christmas. you push this button to charge the metal wire face of the racquet. then upon contact (or within vicinity) of an insect (like a moth or a spider etc) the discharge of electricity shocks the insect and kills it, without you ever coming too close to it. i love it. i killed 3 bugs so far.

my last bug was a mediocre roach on my door. i shocked it and damaged a leg and an antennae. but it was still alive. i shocked it about 5 more times until the shock penetrated the hard chiton carapace. apparantly insects with a hard exoskeleton takes more shocks. hmm, maybe if i power it with a car-battery. maybe then the shock will penetrate roaches in one shot. i swear, roaches are invincible, it seems like.

mini-photographic entry of interest.

okay first i apologize for previous posting. i dont know what kind of mind i had. it is over with now. no more confusing talk.

now, i just want to say that i have craving to go diving.
if you never scuba dived then just skip this section. you can not understand....ah yes. scuba diving. it is very big fun.









will, ben, and i went caving (spelunking) in texas. it was "adventure tour" attraction. but i think it was a walk in park. i dont brag. but it was. it was walk in the park. now what i am used to is pure adrenaline rushing action. like this cave entrance in central america.




and i need a vacation. a vacation that does not have any adrenaline, per se. but for someone like me there would be adrenaline pumping in my veins just because life itself is an adventure. but it is more adventure when you really think and believe it is true. even lying and reading in a hammock, on a peacful sand beach. even then, adrenline will break the blood gates. even then, me adrenaline pours like niagra falls.

genie, in a bottle.

no, i did not find a bottle with a genie in it, silly.
rather, i feel like a genie, a powerful genie, bounded for 10,000 years in an itty bitty living space.

i am certain that i have so much to offer, and am willing to bare torture.
i would die for what i believe in; i'd die for that person as well.

genies are like that. oh. i am so delirious right now. best i sleep.

i didnt mean to make it sound like i am a genie, because im not a genie. and if i somehow made it convinceable that i was thinking of myself as a genie, then of well. im sorry. but the "genie" is symbolic of something else.

and im only being so symbolically cryptic with a hint of espionage because of the flooding emotions of the following list of emotions: fear, anger, confusion in the slight.

good NIGHT!

learning to just let go.

i lived most of my growing years in an 1980's style home in an 80's style neighborhood doing 80's type of stuff and flair. you know, the good old days, those forever lost days of carefree play outside type of days. those days when you and your friends ventured outside on bicycles and yes, on feet. and those days when strangers too would play and spend incredible moments, outside, out in the sun.

so i raised animals. one pet(s) were a family of gerbils.

one day one of these gerbil babies was abandoned and rejected by its siblings, i noticed. and on closer look, it was quite plumpy and slow. something about it was obviously wrong, like as if it couldn't digest. as a kid i remember pinching it with my index and thumb fingers. i dont think i did it any favors by doing that. in fact, i was probably the cause of its death. anyhow, i buried it, in my backyard, underneath the best thing i knew of - the red rose bush (the size of a small tree).

but all i could think about was its soft fur. its eyes, its legs, its tail, and its disease, whatever it was. shortly after burying that gerbil baby, i dug it back up so i could see it once more and hug it once more. then i had enough, and it was time to really bury it, again, and for good. in its same burial ground under the red roses, along with cedar chippings from what it used to call home, i buried it there.

the gruesome death of my parakeet was no better. one morning i found that one of my two parakeets had its throat slashed. it was already dead and cold on the bottom. blood spilt and an open wound. its friend parakeet high up on the cage, too scared to even look down. i blamed it on a cat.

the passing of my best friend, Happy, was not any better either. his death was a slow and eventually a very painful one. one thing i remember most was when i was tying my shoes on the floor, with him lying down behind me and a good 6 feet away. i figured he was recovering from a mystery illness. but i should've known better. he was never known to be quiet. he was never known to be perfectly still. and yet there he was, 6 feet behind me, lying down, and not moving. as i finished tying my shoes i turn around and notice him only one foot away from me. he had crawled up to me, in complete silence. this too was not his style. i left to go to my stupid grade-school classes that day. as i left the front door, i looked back. happy hadn't moved from where i last touched him, from where i had tied my shoes. he died later that day from cardiac arrest. and I entered denial of his passing. and his canine body was requested to be dumped at the city dump yard. and there was no miracle. he never came back.

if you think i be a hardened veteran by now, you could not be any more wrong.

~ i am still learning to let go ~

americans at the fair!

The Texas State Fair is said to be the largest state fair of any state fair across the entire country of the great U.S. of A. around 2004ish, a few friends and I went to this state fair, just for kicks, i think. it was a blast of course, without a doubt. but this book i am currently reading now has caused me to stop and recall and then think about something for a long time...to the point of delaying my reading progress by at least a good hour.

as I walked by this plaza at the fair there was dancing and singing and music, all native american style! it was all cool. but i interpreted the whole "dance" as a form of pagan worship. needless to say, after several moments of watching with honest interest, I walked away, and with probably a small prideful swelling of my own heart, with my "nose slightly struded in the air", thinking that I was walking away from something evil, something that the devil can and has used against me before.

this is something i regret and am painfully shameful of. i dont think this is anything that God has intended. so this book im now reading, thus far, suggests that everything, almost, that I know about worshipping God and pleasing Him and even knowing Him in a tangible/physical manner, is all western european thinking. it is only one shade of color; only one type of lens, so to speak; and one flavor; and most importantly, not necessarily correct.

phoniness in kenya, africa.

[before you read, i would like to warn you that there is mildly foul language and an overall bitter and very negative attitude about a few things. it is all voluntarily done, but i couldn't help it. now you have been warned.]

i love this world Kenya. i really do. totally awesome to the n-th degree. we were the guests of a kenyan minister. his church was a pretty big multi-sited church. congregations mostly composed of people who live in the slumbs, african standard. and his church ministry stretched far and wide throughout kenya.

offering time at one of these church services is nothing short of amazing. people poor with nothing to give will still give in shillings, mere cents US. then we visited his house - a mansion - and i'm talking strictly US standards here. now what the hell's wrong with this damn picture?

a number of team members from this medical mission, that i was fortunate to be a part of, really went out of their way to display their disapproval of many things such as: food, lodging, hygiene, congestion. i mean, every day we see people starving for food, and it's as real as it can be. and when local kenyan hosts humbly and graciously serve us their all... we'd actually have the damn nerve to consume 3 bites of the food in front of us and undiscretely discard the rest simply because the food is not to our liking, or maybe because of the questionable hygiene. what the hell?

we walked through an open-sewaged city of over 1 million in population, the dirt streets congested with "walking skeletons"... and then we have the heart to be thrilled like little children to go safari at the country's most famous safari park. then when all the safari and sight-seeing is over we decide it's absolutely necessary, to the point of paying a premium, to book an early flight back to home-sweet-home. what kind of damn missionaries are we anyway?

the team meets a local pastor and his family in Nairobi, who is incidentally korean, oddly enough. the family welcomes us and serves us and feeds us. the team, in its entirety, left that house with our "noses in the air" while bathing ourselves with the feeling of superiority, simply because we learned that the gentleman is known for laying his hands on people, and allegedly healing them and exorcising demons. we did a pretty efficient job at unanimously labeling him. but i wonder who the hell gave us the authority to do that in the first place?

i realize that not any of this is edifying and very cynical. maybe im going through hormonal changes or something. or maybe its the abrupt weather changes, or something. i just needed to flesh out some points of why we're phonies and how we dont even know that. and i am not excluding myself of this.

the best lunch of my life

the brookhaven community college is a beautiful, small campus staffed with great faculty - far greater, in my opinion, than all the state colleges i've attended. one day, after this one class, a handful of lingering students went out to lunch with the professor. this whole going-out- to-lunch thing with fellow students, off campus, and WITH the professor was kinda alien at that time in my life especially considering it was summer school.

we all sat in at a circular booth. the restaurant was a local oldie favorite, Pete's Cafe. the prof, a devote catholic who then recently started going to mass every morning, is a half-graying bearded man in his 50's or so. everybody else: a catholic male (whom i vaguely remember), a jewish male (paranoid of his Arab classmates), a muslim male (with a very rich father), a buddhist female (who oddly and readily admitted to having STD's), an athiest female (mentally quite a sharp one, as usual), and myself (a "presbyterian" at the time, and a male). needless to say, that was the most intellectually stimulating as well as the most fascinating and invigorating lunch-time conversation i've ever had. and it wasn't like the atmosphere was full of hate or finger-pointing or anything remotely deconstructive and silly like that. on the contrary, it was sheer pleasure. and of course "God" and "religion" and "theology" and the like all came up....that was inevitable. and it went on like this, almost always this same crowd, every day till the last day of class.

that was the year i learned to love History, and not to mention a desire to teach (the prof has this seriously contagious persona about him).

i don't consider myself a presbyterian anymore. actually i don't know exactly what i am. and i don't really seem to care to find out what to label myself anymore. it was always a stupid waste of time anyway the labeling business. stupid. very stupid. ahh those were the good old days of college, when every one of my friends were everything else but christian. i do miss that.

message in a bottle

i wrote my full name and my contact information, in good detail. some wrote poems, some added their contact information, and some just signed their autograph. this paper, along with coarse white sand, a small plant twig, and a few coins, i placed into this clear used bottle of rum. this bottle i tossed into the middle of the ocean amongst millions and millions of waving crests and troughs. i hope somebody will find that bottle, and contact us. just for the sake of the adventure in doing it.

if you can see me writing my message on that cool tropical island just moments before departing again. a fellow adventurer, a professor probably in her 40's, took this picture without my knowledge with a very big camera. but im glad she did.

side note:
i am struggling with discerning between reality and fantasy, again. i've watched too many a movies where the story ends happy. but i know reality is not about happy endings. so how else can i see things other than through the lens of pity? yet i certainly know that life is not about pitying either. and so i find myself stuck between a rock and a hard place.