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 Yea, that’s egg down there. Today I yacked, and it felt great.  Its been a long time since I did something with enough ferocity to work up my stomach into a good healthy vomit.  I started mountain biking with my brother last summer.  He invites me out for a brutal 11mile beat down as often as possible.  I am out of shape, each time we go I get a little bit stronger but a lot more aware of how underutilized my muscular system is.  I don’t work out very hard at all, so I am not accustom to planning for such an afternoon of fatigue.  I didn’t eat any breakfast.  When I got to my brothers he whipped me up some ham, a bagel, and three eggs… sunny side up.  I ate it all, thinking I would need the protein to make it through.  At about the 6 mile mark, my body violently rejected the protein.  After I got it out, I felt great.  We went on to finish the last 5 miles in record time… okay we finished anyways.  But I did feel a lot better.  This whole pushing yourself thing is really worth something.  Normally if I have an upset stomach, I take a nap… maybe I need to go running until I vomit and then get on with life, hooraaa.  Isn’t that what the marines scream when they do 500 push ups and jump through a wall of barbed wire.  Ya, I felt that cool.

Categories: Compliments, General Smatering
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Categories: Art, Music, General Smatering
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http://www.rbc.org/utmost/index.php?month=03&day=09

When God gives you a clear determination of His will for you, all your striving to maintain that relationship by some particular method is completely unnecessary. All that is required is to live a natural life of absolute dependence on Jesus Christ. Never try to live your life with God in any other way than His way. And His way means absolute devotion to Him.

This I found quite encouraging and unsettling at the same time.  This is how I want to live, but what if I have not received a clear determination of His will, what if I have misconstrued my own desires for his clear determination, what if I am waiting for the clear determination but I can’t believe I have received it yet by the mere fact that I am questioning it?

And then, every once in a while, I can take a step back from my endless maze of logician questioning and get really simple.  Some people call it “getting back to the basics”; I like to think of it as “going with what I got”.  There are certain things about the Christian life that I am absolutely certain about.  I would even call them convictions.  When I act on these convictions in the simplest ways I find myself becoming naturally drawn into the most meaningful moments of my relationship with God.

An example perhaps….
But first, a note.  For me, the clear determinations have rarely been about a future event or path, but rather what I should attend to right now.

Over the past few years I have arrived at a conviction that the people I have naturally come into contact with, right now, are more important than my future and my plans for the future.  In that sense I believe that God’s clear determination of His will for my life is that I tend to the people in my life before I tend to the plans I have for my own life.

Qualifying plans:  I know we are not supposed to have any “plans” and everything is in God’s hands and his timing and all that.  Well, I don’t know it in the exact sense that I always live by it, but I am familiar with the teaching on it.  But when we are given a vision for something to pursue, perhaps from God if we are not being directed by our natural impulses at the moment, you have to plan your life around seeing the vision to some point of fruition.  I believe this is a good thing.  But along the way in your planning and progress you will come in contact with a lot of people.

This ends me in a battle between the utility of pursuing my plan vs. the clear determination that I am to tend to the relationships that have been given to me.  More often than not I seem to find my plans require the people who have been naturally invited into my life.  My vision enlarges as I live and it reshapes to see how important and necessary all of the relationships I have been given are to God’s will for my life, even His will that I follow through with the vision He has given to me.

Doing things strictly out of utility, even for the intention of a stronger relationship with God, then becomes irrelevant.  I don’t think this defeats the need for discipline and routines, but I do believe it puts them in their proper place and allows you to live a more natural life of Joy and not a exasperating life of striving.  The Christian life may be a marathon, but sometimes when I am running, I forget that I am running and that seems to be when I enjoy it the most.

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It’s Scary.
It’s scary how well I identify with a 5 year old BBC show about office life.
For all practical purposes I am Tim.

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Categories: Movies, Criticisms, General Smatering
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http://www.rbc.org/utmost/index.php?month=02&day=27

We all try to pawn off our existance on our surface life.  Over time you begin to define yourself with only negatives and by your detriments.  But it is our hope that there is something deeper in us, something better.  Eventually we will come accross a few experiences were it can come out, and we may begin to wonder, “Am I capable of doing something good for the right reasons?”  It’s a lot easier to go with the feeling that I am a worthless surface of a person, nobody expects much from someone like that, not even yourself.

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One of the biggest selling points to all of the creative tools that I use is a little feature referred to as, Non-Destructive Workflow.  At first glance a NDW, as I will refer to it from now on, seems like nothing more than a fancy name for the undo button.  But it is actually much, much more.  I have recently started to understand just how much this concept of content creation has affected my regular life.  A NDW was novel at one time, but it has quickly become the most expected, although often missing, feature of software.  I understand it best when working with 3D modeling software.  The basic idea is that the tree of creation choices that ended you were you are is always available to go back into, modify, fix, add, and ultimately recreate the piece of art that you are working on.  This is not just a tool; it’s more like a philosophy that is woven between all of the options in piece of software.  We are continually invited to embrace technology into our daily lives, sometimes we inadvertantly embrace the accompanied idealistic philosophies into our basic assumptions about life, regardless of how cumbersome the technologies prove to be in practice.

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Ok, so some of my posts… I don’t know why, but when I post them, they screw up the width of my site and the top banner does not match up with the main body and the footer anymore.  Its hard for me to explain to you how much this upsets me, I probably will in truth lose sleep over this.  Just another example of how technology slowly undoes all of its promises and engulfs what could have been a productive life…

Categories: About This, General Smatering
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Categories: Criticisms, General Smatering
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Your experience as an intern will never be topped in the rest of your working career. When I mention this as an observation to friends who are currently in the middle of the upward career climb, they usually agree with me without hesitation. You may make more money, have more respect, do things that are more meaningful… but you will never recapture the glorious feeling of being an intern. Perhaps I will someday have the good fortune of looking back on a career of accomplishments and be able to examine my own arrival at a place of accomplishment and importance mixed with the respect of my peers and in that moment I may feel as good about work as I did when I was an intern, but I doubt it. Now I am quite sure that many people have had terribly awful internship experiences… but I would still maintain that the intern in that experience would be better off that someone who was working full time at the same activity.

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The Christmas season is near and I have been reunited with all the usual melodies, one of which struck me the other day…

Frosty the Snowman, knew the sun was hot that day,
so he said, “Let’s run, and we’ll have some fun now, before I melt away.”

If anyone has something to worry about it is definitely frosty the snowman. But somehow he is able to reach beyond his frailty and impending doom and live a very full life in the day he has been given. Oddly enough, it seems that makes frosty my current hero.

P.S.
The originators of frosty never intended for anything inspiring to come of his story, he was merely a pawn of a capitalistic jingle ploy.
History of Frosty (Its on the internet, it has to be true)
But I don’t think frosty would have let that get him down, we shouldn’t either.

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