Those Who Can’t Do…

…can still help others to teach.

You might have noticed a few days back that I sent some good vibes to my blog-bud Crisitunity, who finds herself in just such a crisi-tunity situation right about now.  Choosing to focus on the opportunity side thereof, she’s making a leap of faith and attempting to use the loss of her job as a chance to follow her dream of teaching yoga.

She’s set up a site to sell some of her short stories in exchange for $3 toward her Teacher Training Fund.  Having read some of Crisitunity’s fiction before, I can tell ya, it’s good stuff.  And even if you don’t agree, just think of the great karma you’ll be earning by helping out!

I have to say, when I heard of the idea I was somewhat skeptical – my general opinion of humanity tends to be fairly low.  I tried to gently prepare her for disappointment.  The result, so far, has been a stunning indictment of my misanthropy.  Lesson:  Take TB’s pessimism with a huge grain of salt.  And also:  there are good hearted people out there after all.

And so, heady with a new burst of optimism in human nature and the power of the internet, I say this:  Like many of us, Crisitunity could use a hand.  You don’t even have to take my word for it.  Everybody, at one point in his or her life, has a dream.  Some of us have been close, and just needed a little nudge to put us up on top.  If ever you’ve had a dream and could use a little help to get there, consider giving the gal a chance.

I don’t know about you guys, but to me, life feels a little better when it feels like folks help each other out…and that the good people have a shot.  And that means that today, I feel pretty damned good.

Thanks, folks.

Monday Music

But what I really wanna know is…

Lenny Kravitz, “Are You Gonna Go My Way”

A New Suit

Those of you of normal vision and not heavily under the influence of some substance or other will probably notice that I’ve changed my theme and layout a little bit.

As I added the No Butts About It graphic (thanks, Laura!) and stuff, I decided it was time to mess around with my widgets a bit.

Then I decided the whole damned list was too long.  I deleted a few but they were short ones anyway.  So then I thought, “Ooh, who has a good three-column theme instead of a two-column?  Laura does!”    I looked, and yep, that seemed like the way to go.

Then I went to browse themes, and found that many allow a custom header, or have three columns, but very few have both.  I’m kinda attached to my header image, really.  It was actually the one thing about my design that I really was happy with.  But this one, Digg 3, had both, so voila!

Any comments?  Too cluttered?  Did I delete something you find useful?  Could I reorganize things to put more helpful bits and pieces up high where they’d be more friendly?  Should I go suck a tailpipe?

Feedback welcome.  It’ll probably take me quite a while to get used to myself, so until then I’m game to shift some stuff around.

Finding Ferracci

Today I want to tell a story about a guy named John (a pseudonym).  John’s not a friend, more of an acquaintance, but a guy I’ve gotten to know over a few years via my motorcycle board.  A motorcyclist, (sometime motorcycle racer), musician, and generally good guy.  The fact that the guy can play a gig one weekend and race a Ducati the next makes me twelve shades of Envy Green.

A few years ago, John was let go from a good job.  Suddenly and unexpectedly.  As any reasonable human being would do, he flailed about in desperation for a few days before settling into a determined job hunt.  It wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t easy, but suddenly the clouds parted and a blazing ray of sunshine laid upon John like the finger of the Almighty.  He interviewed for, and won, a job at a motorcycle shop.  Not just any shop:  Fast By Ferracci.  That name surely means nothing to most of you, but the motorcyclists among you just got a lot more interested.  That’s because FBF isn’t just a motorcycle shop; they’ve also sponsored race teams that have won both AMA and World Superbike titles.  More than once.

For many a motorcyclist, working for Eraldo Ferracci is a dream job.  It was for John, who not only got to work there, but also got partial sponsorship and parts discounts to race a Ducati.  Hard to beat that with a stick!

That was a couple of years ago.  A few weeks ago, John’s longtime live-in girlfriend suddenly split with him.  Again, with no real warning and not much explanation.  Again, he floundered for a while…but then picked himself up and found that as he reconnected with himself, not the self that he’d lapsed comfortably into during his relationship (as even the best of us tend to do) but a more genuine self, he found someone he liked.  A lot.

And that was apparently contagious, as he soon found himself paired up with a female friend who’d also just ended a long relationship.  And, he said, did he mention she’d done a little modeling?  It’s amazing how things work out, he said.

I replied that for the last several years “Finding Ferracci” has been my own personal shorthand for looking for that one thing that you didn’t even know you needed, sometimes when you need it most.  I told him that “Finding Ferracci” twice in a decade must mean he was livin’ right.

For me, just knowing John’s story to be true always serves as a little ray of hope when things look bleak.  A reminder that sometimes the world or God or karma or the Great Tao work in ways that make little sense at the time but can bring us to peace in the end.

So I hold out a warm feeling of hope for a good friend.  If anybody can pull an opportunity from a crisis, she can.

Quick Hits

Still heinously busy in general, and out of the office quite a bit.  I feel a little guilty for not having much to blog about lately, but I’ve gone through these little phases before and suddenly I’ll have a ten-page opus spring forth from my head.  So don’t panic.  I’ll be making you say “sheesh, does this guy ever STFU!?!?” again very soon.

***

The biggest thing going on in my life is that I’ve started hitting the gym again and generally doing weight-loss-y stuff.  But I’m blogging about that over at No Butts About It.  Those of you who care can come on over and see (we’re generally a fairly incestuous blogroll, aren’t we?  and odds are somebody else whose blog you read is posting there too); those who don’t care can spare themselves the eye-rolling.

***

I really need to update my blog to reflect the No Butts stuff, and a few other changes to the blogroll.  People moving, new blogs, etc.  I probably won’t have time today but hopefully by Friday…

***

I’ve been doing a lot of grunt work lately – stuff that needs to be done, desperately, for all kinds of perfectly good reasons, but isn’t the kind of work I went to graduate school for.

You know what?  I like it.  Even though it’s unairconditioned and it’s been so hot lately that the last two days we’ve done it, a sympathetic lady in the AC’ed office next door has brought us Fla-Vor-Ice popsicles in the afternoon, I feel good when I’m done for the day.

It’s a similar sort of feeling that I expressed several weeks ago in a comment over on Crisitunity’s page.  In some nebulous way it feels more like “real work” than what I do.  I feel like, unlike my actual job, I wouldn’t have to explain it to my gruff old great-grandfather, and then watch him sort of sniff at it when I was done with my partially incomprehensible-to-him explanation.

It reminds me of some thinking I’ve done from time to time, and in a very disorganized manner, on masculinity and masculine roles.  And I just the other day remembered a book that a counselor recommended to me some years ago that I’ve never read, so I might put that little bugger on my list to read in the near future.

Perhaps, if I’m lucky enough to have some insight, I’ll have more to say on this subject later.

***

Just generally, between that thinking I’ve been doing lately, some talking to Dys and a couple of others, and probably partially because I just plowed through the whole second season of In Treatment over the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about seeing an old counselor again.  Not because I feel a crisis, just because I think I have plateaued on the frontier of self-knowledge and I wonder if having a guide would help me climb a little higher.

Still, even with insurance, that stuff’s not cheap and money isn’t exactly falling out of my pockets nowadays.  (Especially since the Indy GP is coming up, and so is the Tool concert that I managed to convince Dys we needed tickets to.  Expensive tickets.  But Tool is about the only act that I’ll willingly pay more than $50 and sit in an arena for nowadays.)  Best do some reading first and ponder calling in a guide later.

***

Finally, this weekend my son and I finally started on the model we bought back in January.  Frankly, I expect it’ll take longer to finish than it did for us to get started, but so far I’m enjoying myself.  He doesn’t seem to want to do it for very long at a time, but he already seems to have enjoyed painting pieces a bit more on the second day than he did on the first, so I’ll take each step as a good one.

Hope everybody’s having a good week.  And staying cool!

Monday Music

A while back I finally revised the long-planned Rainy Mix into a disc.  I’ve been spinning it from time to time since then, but opportunities have been harder since I don’t have an hour a day in the car anymore now that Boy is out of school.  Anyway, I’m gradually getting some ideas to refine it.  Luckily I saved it to my iPod when it was at 200 songs, before I cut it down to 149 to fit on a disc – so it’ll be easier to go back and add things that I ended up taking out should I choose to do so.

Anyway, I thought I’d give a little preview.  This song would have been on the list even if it was only 10 songs.  (But this is NOT the song that made me completely stop production when I found out it was in the wrong compression format so I could re-compress it to a form that would burn.  I looked for a YouTube vid of that song unsuccessfully, so you’ll just have to wait!  Mwuhahahah!)

Mother Love Bone, “Gentle Groove”

Out There

This morning, as I was taking my morning walk, I saw something cross the road about fifty yards ahead of me.  It was far enough away that I can’t be 100% sure, but unless there are some really long-faced cats in my neighborhood, it was a fox.  Which would make it the second one I’ve ever seen in the wild.

Being out at daybreak is invigorating for me.  Once I drag my ass out of bed…and in the case of this morning, once I open the door and go “GAH, it’s STEAMY already!!” (according to the Weather Channel, 75 degrees, 87% humidity before 6am – hello summer!)…it’s really enjoyable.  I can’t completely forget that I’m in the city, as the streetlights and the gentle hum of even the earliest-morning traffic can be heard all of the time, but in my quiet neighborhood  it’s as close to peace as I think you can get under the circumstances.

It reminds me of why I hunted and fished when I lived in the country where such things were easily done.  It brought back the peace that I had during my vacation last week while out on the boat with Dys or just on the dock by myself – despite minor mother-in-law psychic eddies, I could just let my mind drift.  Beautiful.

The 5:30am alarm sucks, but it has rewards beyond the exercise.  That’s pretty damned cool.

And as a funny postscript, lying in the front yard of one house was a Mylar balloon that wasn’t there before.  It wasn’t tied to anything, but was clearly just having crashed there, spent.  It read “Happy Mother’s Day.”  Doesn’t it make you wonder where it started?

Lost Generation

My coworker sent this to me a few days ago, and I was duly impressed.  I knew I had to share it, I just put it aside and forgot about it.  D’oh!

Hope you enjoy.

Edit:  Crap.  The embedding is all funky and won’t work.  Here’s a link instead.  Go watch it (it’s less than two minutes long) – and pay attention to the text as it goes by.  Yes, it seems unnecessary at first but it’ll pay off.

No thanks?

I just got back from the dentist.  Strangely, I got out early because they were busier than I’ve ever seen that office.  Usually, they say “oops, there’s a little problem, how about we fix it right now?”  Today, it was “this will only take about 15-30 minutes.  We’ll make you an appointment for next week.”  And back out to the waiting room full of people.

But seriously…do you think dental hygienists go home to their husbands (or wives, but in my 35 years my hygienists have always been women, although I suppose they could have lady partners at home…) some days, if not every day, and dodge every attempt at a kiss?  I take fairly decent care of my teeth (I know I should floss more) but every time I’m there and they’re scraping and clawing away I feel like I’m a filthy bastard.  And surely many others are worse.

Staring into that maw every damned day of my life might make me insist on at least a good solid 90 seconds of the old-fashioned Medicinal Death formula ™ Listerine before somebody else was allowed to put their tongue in MY mouth.

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

Augh!  It’s blinding, my eyes, my eyes!

Seriously, maybe one more day and things will start to get back to normal.  Well, halfway.  I’ve sort of inherited this ongoing project that will have me out of the office a day or three a week for quite some time – possibly all summer.  Working without air conditioning – joy!  I’ll look at it as a weight loss option.

I have been assiduously avoiding logging in to WordPress in general because – and I know this sounds stupid, but it’s how my brain is working right now – I didn’t want to start catching up on everyone’s blogs until I could sit down and do them almost all at once.  Why?  Because I didn’t want anyone to see I’d commented on someone else’s blog and not theirs and get bummed.

In retrospect, it seems even more stupid than I’d originally thought, because I don’t think anybody is really so nitpicky as to get butt-hurt over such a thing, but at this point I’ve reached a spot at which I think I can get caught up by tomorrow or Friday anyway.

So expect me to stop by and say hi in the next couple of days.  I might not comment as much as usual, but it’s because if I comment on every post that I normally would have, I’d feel like even more of a pompous windbag than usual.  (And that’s pretty tough, eh?)

In the meantime, because I have WAY more runoffatthemouthedness than is healthy (and more than I have free time, natch), I’ve joined the fine ladies at No Butts About It to comment on health, fitness, and body issues type stuff.  Providing a little male perspective and all that.  So I’ll be tweaking the blog face here a little bit to reflect that over the next few days, as I find some time.

And I only had to sleep with one of them to get the job.  (The others didn’t ask.  I’m not holding my breath.)

Hope everybody’s having a good week so far!  Despite being insanely busy, things are pretty good in TB-world.