reading the paper can kill you

it is hard to enjoy anything currently. just this past weekend, i was at the pub enjoying a meal with a friend. as we shared in good conversation, little nagging thoughts occasionally popped into my head. just how quickly does second-hand smoke turn my lungs into tumorous blocks? is my burger cooked medium-rare infected with bacteria that will liquefy my intestines? have the land burning, communist agents working for the philadelphia parking authority towed away my car for an 30 second-expired meter?

i fully blame this prevalent worrywart-itis on the media. anytime you open up the paper or turn on the ten o’clock news, it is all doom and gloom. corrupt city governments are misappropriating funds, old men in suits on wall street are reducing your retirement funds to the value of last year’s laptop, and toxic cat litter is turning your kitty’s insides to concrete – the list goes on and on.

eventually, someone is going to find a connection between newspaper ink and skin cancer. and because we’re told that watching the television gives you glaucoma and turning on the car radio while driving means you’ll go through the pearly gates backwards and on fire, how will we ever learn about the dangers of newspaper reading? surely not through the interweb, which is filled only with pedophiles and terrorists.

as i write this, i am reading an article that documents how drinking, even in moderation, shrinks your brain. the pathetic scaremonger who performed this study clearly has nothing in life which makes him happy and is seeking revenge on the world by spreading his hate and misery. rest assured, drinking only affects your brain in the short term, and in that short term, alcohol is a magical and wonderful thing. benjamin franklin once said that “beer is living proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy.” in the long term, alcohol in all forms lowers the incident of heart disease and red wines are chock full of powerful antioxidants. so don’t worry about your brain’s cleverness and enjoy your glass of chablis, your ice cold martini, or your pint of lager.

unless youre drinking keystone light, in which case i might start believing that article.

planning

how much do you plan?

personally, i hate planning. attempting to anticipate the events of the future seems a bit futile to me, even bordering on hubris, and we all know what happened to icarus. ive heard it said that there’s no use in building the biggest boat when you can’t raise the tide, and that’s so true, it hurts.

but how about my decision making? don’t all my decisions point in a certain direction that i want to take my life in? for example, the choices i make at work affect my positive or negative standing at work, which determine which city i live in. and if i continue to live in philadelphia, there’s a very good chance that i’m committing to a grisly death by stray bullet fire or stab wounds. wait, now i’m confused about the chain of events that has led to me being killed to death.

no matter, because what i’ve learned remains the same. the harder you try to grip the control joystick of life, the more you realize that nearly everything is out of your control. when you, my faithful readers, learn this, you will look down and realize that what you thought was the control joystick of life is actually a slimy, wet, trout. and the harder you grip it, the more it will squirm out of your hands.

so man the rudders, but have faith in the current.

david crowder band rocks

“Ever faithful
Ever true
You I know
You never let go

In joy and pain
In sun and rain
You’re the same
Oh, You never let go”

the david crowder band concert was pretty rockingly awesome. my ears are still bleeding from it but never have blood from my eustachian tubes felt so sweet.

interestingly, the song that meant the most to me was a song on his newest album that i wasn’t too crazy about, never let go. the lyrics above smacked me in the groin and face simultaneously.

like a mac truck hitting a startled deer.

Metaphor

I recently talked to a good friend about what it means to reconcile a relationship. This question struck me as odd because I couldn’t quite put it into words. Anyway, I came up with the following.

Relational reconciliation is a balancing of two sides. When a relationship is reconciled, you and the other person have set a distance that will separate you from them, and reason why the distance was established as such is known to both people.

When you and your best mate have an argument over which is a better car, the Ferrari F430 or the Porsche 911 Turbo, reconciliation is pretty straight forward and easy: the Ferrari is better if you’re a drug dealer or a footballer, the 911 is better if you need a place to have a mid-life crisis. Both parties realize that the argument is a rather small gap to bridge and the distance between you and him remains small and doesn’t change much.

When you and your girl friend of a few years break up, a huge rift opens up. It is so large that you cannot see the other side and if you were to try to cross the chasm without some sort of bridge, you would impale yourself on the jagged rocks below. So reconciliation is deciding what sort of bridge will be built, how far it will span, and whether the chasm can be shortened.Just like building a bridge, this requires hard work, sweat, blood, and engineers. Because people are lazy and engineers in general have poor people skills and make poor company (just kidding guys, haha), reconciliation of this sort of more uncommon.

My metaphor only goes this far.

commute

Sometimes on my commute to work, I like to shut off my radio and just listen.

The gentle hum of my car’s engine, my tires on the rough Philadelphian back roads, horns from road raged drivers, and the occasional bird chirping. I am just another anonymous car flowing in a river of sheet metal, glass, and rubber. My destination is unknown to all around me but I drive purposefully, avoiding potholes and timing my braking and throttle to coincide with traffic light patterns. My knowledge that God knows where I am headed comforts me.

To Him, I’m not just another gray car on the road.