What exactly did I learned? I can’t really say but I think it has something to do with how important family is, or should be. And to always put the turkey in the frig not the freezer as soon as you get it home.

In ascending  order of effectiveness.

i’ve only used 3 of the 5 to make enemies, try to guess which 3!

5) Play Texas-Hold em on the Alzheimer ward at your local nursing home:

Change the rules as necessary to assure that you take home all the Social Security money you can stuff in your pockets!

4) Punch/kick the spawn of strangers w/out reason

Midget punting lost it’s appeal? Try toddler punching instead. Bonus points for the kid on a leash.

Tip: If played just right the kid on a leash paired with attached parent can be used for a fun game of impromptu “tether-baby”

3) Dress like Hitler and attend a Bar Mitzvah

For a little extra flair claim their sofa as your own & refer to it as “Mein Kampf-Y seat”

2) Be honest

If you want to stack up enemies like Paul Bunyan stacked up sequoias in his pacific-north-west de-forestation campaign then just be honest. i’m not talking about brutal/cruel honesty, just plain open heart-felt honesty.

Especially in our modern Christian tradition.

Be honest about your doubts, your struggles, your questions and failures & just wait for the Pharisee-piranhas to smell the blood in the water.

It is true that in the current changing spiritual climate that there are many people who will embrace your honesty (& you – side hug only if you are of the opposite sex) openly. Yet there still remain those who view any honest expression as stage-one blasphemy & the first step onto a yellow baby-oil slathered slip-n-slide that leads directly into the gaping mouth of Hell itself.

1) Ride a bike

It doesn’t matter what kind of bike you ride all will engender a passionate loathing if you venture beyond the confines of your own drive-way or lawn on them. But if you want to really make enemies- buy a road bike.

Nothing makes blood boil faster than riding a road bike on America’s by-ways.

NEWSFLASH for impatient American Drivers:

Walmart will still be there when you get there.

Little Caesars will still sell $6 pizzas.

You CAN pass a cyclist.

If your presence was that urgent and important wherever you are headed you should a) leave earlier next time OR b) your local government will issue  you a vehicle equipped with lights & a siren.

The worst offenders by far are what are affectionately called by both those who love them and hate them alike as: Rednecks.

Yes, those dip spitting, truck raising, gun toting, confederate flag waving “good-ole boys” are the most expressive about their hatred for their fellow humans who enjoy propelling themselves along on 2 skinny tires.

That’s right; the same folks who think it’s outrageous that the law frown on their use of 4 wheelers on public highways has an extreme distaste for others who use other alternative transportation on those same roads.

The same people who ride their demon-steeds (aka: horses) on the road averaging a blistering pace of 4-6 miles per hour on lengthy rides become angry when others are crawling along at a snails pace averaging only 14-20mph!

New idea for the back of a cycling jersey: “i support hunting rights, please don’t kill me!”

Also: old folks will hate you & refuse to cross the center yellow line when passing you; buzzing past you inches away with their myopic vision and slowed reflexes!

Figure out which 3 i’ve employed to engender hatred yet?

ok, maybe it’s only 2…

5 time-wasters hopefully you haven’t found on the interwebs yet:

How would we trudge through a 40+ hour week of work, in a slave-cave (cubicle or small office), staring at a glowing rectangle for hours each day if we didn’t have the interwebs & it’s conveniently minimizable windows of distraction? Well, tomorrow is Friday, that obligatory day in the office where we watch the clock more anxiously than a NASA tech who is “pretty sure” he checked those O-rings.

Here are a few sites that i hope you haven’t heard of to kill some time at your employers expense:

1) Tweeting Too Hard:

http://tweetingtoohard.com/

Great site to kill 5 or 10 minutes. With a plethora of retards twitting the play-by-play of their lives (self included) there’s plenty to mock & scoff at in the twitter-verse.

2) Virtual NES

http://www.virtualnes.com/list/index.html

Yes! THAT NES!!!

Most games use the arrow keys and z&x as A&B.

It even has the greatest Mario Game of all time: Super Mario 2!!

If you have ever wondered here’s the definitive list (per me):

#1: Super Mario 2

#2: Mario 64

#3: Super Mario

#4: Super Mario World (two words: Yoshi Debut)

#5: Super Mario Wii

3) Be Funky

http://www.befunky.com/

Super easy. Take your pics and pimp em’

Now adults everywhere can have cool facebook pics like photoshop prodigy middleschool students!

4) 3rd World Farmer

http://www.arcadetown.com/3rdworldfarmer/gameonline.asp

The time waster that will prick your conscious. Simple turn based farming game that opens our 1st world eyes to the struggles of our less fortunate brothers and sisters on spaceship Earth.

Don’t expect to do any celebratory “i-just-nailed-the-solo-to-Fire-and-Flames!!!” dances. But it’s a tad addicting AND conscious pricking at the same time.

Then if you want to do more:

http://www.kiva.org/

http://www.freerice.com/

Just a few suggestions…

5) Oh Crap. My Parents Joined Facebook.

http://myparentsjoinedfacebook.com/

i have a dear friend who stresses constantly about their mother’s Facebook activities. So in honor of her and her stressing about maternal posts i suggest this amazing little time-waster!

Just want to say, my dad’s on Facebook & to my knowledge he has never done weird any Facebook faux pas, yet another reason my dad can beat your dad up!

Well, that’s just a sampling of time-wasters: Got any that deserve to join the ranks of FailBlog, Awkward Family Photos, People of Walmart or the Holy Grail of time-wasters: Stumbleupon (the only thing in the universe MORE addictive than a cocktail of Methamphetiamines, Heroin and Dirty Jobs Marathons)? If you do leave me some comments so i can kill some time in your favorite internet spots.

5 Books i’ve read (or Re-read) recently that may change the way you think about everyday stuff:

1) The Paradox of Choice – Barry Schwartz

The basic premise of this book is that more choices don’t equal more happiness. In fact just the opposite tends to be true. Let me explain with an example:

Remember your first cell phone? i remember mine; a Nokia whose most exciting feature was Snake. You remember Snake don’t you? The simplest yet most addictive cell-phone game of all times! Back to my Nokia: It was a simple stick of a phone, it couldn’t even text, all it could do was send and receive calls. That’s it. i was completely satisfied with that phone. It did it’s job, did it well and hung out in my pocket for about 2 years if i remember correctly.

Fast forward: Remember the last time you went cell-phone shopping? Touch-screen or not; Qwerty keypad or no; how many mega-pixels is the camera; will it work as an mp3 player; what apps are available for it; web capable or not; unlimited text plan; which data plan do you get; what color do you want your phone to be… i stopped going to shop for phones. My last phone i bought used off a friend, my current one was a Christmas present (oddly enough from the same friend i bought the last one off of). It’s just too overwhelming to pick out “The One”… No matter what phone we buy there is always that tiny comparison shopper in the back of our heads, wondering and wondering if we picked the right one…

2) Simple Church- Thom S. Rainer & Erick Geiger

Remember: i am a minister by profession (i know, it IS hard to believe most days, but nevertheless it’s true), i’m also the kind of guy who honestly wants to be the best i can be at any job i do. Sometimes i read stuff and think, “This is bologna!” Sometimes i read a book and think, “This is a new idea…” Sometimes i read and think, “i KNEW it!” Simple Church was an i KNEW it book. Somewhere deep inside i had this nagging gut feeling that all the “stuff” that we do in the church world wasn’t nearly as important as we thought it was. As cliche as it sounds the premise of this book is “Less is more”.

If you are vocationally spiritual add this to your summer reading list!

3) Buyology- Martin Lindstrom

Great book about what advertising does to our brains! Why we want what we want, even when we rationalize that we don’t want it. Martin Lindstrom has harnessed the power of technology to ferret the truth out of our 3 pounds of gray matter.

Some pretty cool stuff…

4) Flickering Pixels- Shane Hipps

Great read about how technology has shaped our thinking, and the way we engage with spiritual things.

He also hits some real soft-spots in his book: He talks about how Campus Crusade for Christ’s oft distributed Gospel presentation tool of the train of fact, faith and feeling is broken.

There is also a whole chapter about how we, Christians, have been “answering” questions for years that no one is really asking! Like: How do you gap the separation between you and God?

Is there a separation? Of course. We know there is, but heres a news-flash: People who aren’t Christians don’t normally care about that separation.

This book had moments of “i KNEW that” & moment’s of “This is a new idea…”

5) The Bible- Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, Paul, Mark, Peter on and on and on.

Yes, The Bible. It’s definitely one of the most challenging books i’ve ever read, ok… THE most challenging book. i think that too often we, again by we i mean those of us who profess to be Christians, read the Bible without really reading it.

We put our kids to sleep by reading them stories of Noah and his ark filled with adorable animals, as the REST OF THE WORLD DROWNS TO DEATH!

We read about turning the other cheek, loving our neighbors, City walls collapsing super-naturally, killing women and children in a holy war, on and on and we read them like we’re reading the Reader’s Digest.

Here’s my challenge for my readers: Read Matthew chapters 5,6 & 7. See if that fits with what Christianity has become. See if that fits with your “Christian” thinking. See if that doesn’t mess your world up!

Happy reading! & if you have read any books lately that challenged/changed your thought processes hit me up with a comment! i’m always looking for a good book to read.

Having kids is one of the most challenging, life changing and stretching things that you can do. Surprisingly you can make a kid without any sort of testing AND tons of people do it. Some even do it multiple times, so as not to have their spawn leave their pupa stage (also known as the teen-years where they enter a cocoon of angst and entitlement) and emerge as an adult mal-adjusted and self-centered.

Having kids is 98.75% likely to be the root cause of some level of insanity. Today’s thursday 5 is a list of 5 proofs that kids drive the sane into mad-hatter-territory.

5 irrefutable proofs that some parents are CRAZY!

1) Kid-leashes

When your child is so buck-wild that it’s unsafe to take them un-restrained into a public place then institutionalization may need to be an option you keep on the table.

OR

If as a parent you are too lazy to teach your kid to not run away in public, gnashing their tiny toddler teeth and attacking grandmothers and candy displays with equal animalistic abandon; then it may be time to consider foster care.

OR

If perusing the $5.00 DVDs at Walmart is more important to you then making occasional visual checks to make sure your little-tyke is within easy restraining range; maybe, just maybe, parenthood wasn’t for you.

i’m sure there are some legitimate reasons to leash your child… OK i’m not sure of that! TAKE THE DANG LEASH OFF. Either you’re insane or a designer of info-mercial products if you think kid-leashes are in any way a good invention.

2) $200+ strollers

So what if it has rack & pinion steering, independent suspension & heated seats: ultimately it’s just a foldable platform built to haul a little person who doesn’t have: good bowel control, much self-control in general and lacks the endurance to withstand force-marches of commerce.

When dropping a mint on a stroller seems like a good move: you’re crazy.

Maybe you say it’s a “quality issue”: Well, i’m not advocating just picking up some finger severing, umbrella-esqe, child-hauling device from the Dollar Tree. But how many miles is your stroller gonna log? If you can honestly say more than 1,500 miles then spend the benjamins on a good one.

or maybe it’s a “comfort issue”: Yes, your small child: the one who could sleep on a slab of rusty nail encrusted concrete in turn three of the Daytona 500 needs all that plushness to get some mobile shut-eye.

Once i saw a lady pull up to a park on her RV-sized SUV oil-field consumer & after literally climbing down to the ground and removing her solitary child from a vehicle with it’s own zip-code (yep, 2- TWO – people in their own GMC tour-bus) she moved to the back docking bay… i mean hatch and removed a clearly costly stroller that MATCHED her SUV. If i hadn’t seen it i wouldn’t believe it!

3) Kids on answering machines/voice mail

Yes, your kids are adorable… to you!

Look i have kids. My kids are better than your kids. Maybe not in every way, you may have a kid who gets better grades, or is a better athlete, or is in “Who’s Who of American Students” (folks- it’s a money making scam, just FYI): But total package- my kids are clearly superior. In the event of a real zombie invasion, while your kids are sucking the skull marrow out of the family dog, my kids will be leading the resistance.

i said all that to say this: really you don’t care how awesome my kids are. You are quite content to bask in the awesomeness (you falsely perceive) in your own progeny.

i think my dog is the greatest mongrel to ever poop in a neighbor’s yard, but you don’t want to see pictures of her. If she can do some awesome trick you may be interested in that.

Transfer that idea to putting your kid on your answering machine: sure you think it’s cute, but (grandparents aside) NOBODY ELSE DOES! Unless your kid can do some really amazing tricks (spitting fire, sharp-shooting, crocheting heart-valves from chicken gristle, etc.) then keep them to yourself. Thank you.

Plus it’s just annoying to have to decipher toddler-garble over a phone: “Hewoyoubreechedda….uhhhhh……gwawsonhows, pweeseweevemymummadaddaamessage…….afta beep…..”

4) Using kids as Facebook default pics

See above:

If it’s a picture of you AND your kid, that’s not so bad. But JUST your kid… then you need to work on maintaining your own identity.

5) Orbit mentality

What is orbit mentality: it’s this mode of parenting where the child(ren) become the center of the parents EVERYTHING! When you don’t have a schedule, you have your child’s schedule.

When everything is planned around them.

Vacations.

Date Nights.

Hobbies (if you actually have one)

EVERYTHING!

i remember when i was a kid: If my parents planned a vacation and i had an event in the middle of it did they reschedule our vacation? NO, i missed my thing! Abusive, i know. Cruel. What would i have been if they had only reworked their schedules around my interests?

Once you are promoted to worker drone (be in on wall-street, Capital Hill, plunging toilets or flipping burgers) you quickly realize that the universe doesn’t revolve around you- if you don’t realize it you wind up at some awards show thanking all the “little-people” who helped you become what you are today, or you depose the government of some third-world country and become a dictator.

3 tips for Orbit Mentality parents:

> You (the parent) should have a LIFE: one day (hopefully) your kids will leave you for a mate of their own- it’s your goal to raise them to be OK w/out you. When they leave you don’t want to find yourself in a limbo of emptiness.

> Your child should NOT ever be called your “Best-friend”. You are the parent, they are the child! My dad can never be my BFF! He’s my dad! That’s weird and un-healthy. Neither should your little demon be your highest ranking social connection.

> Please, please, please… for the love of all that is good… refrain from calling your daughters “Princess”! Unless she is in succession for the throne of a kingdom, then it is quite alright to give her that title. (If her “kingdom” is your heart- then punch yourself in the nose!)

Well, there you have it. When my own children grow up to be lifers in the state pen you will all know it’s because their father never showed them the love they needed. Call social services; get Dr. Dobson lined up for an intervention; send my kids monetary contributions to help ease their suffering (please send it in cash or check’s written out to their primary care provider -ME!); do something before i ruin 3 kids with my heartless ways.

5-”Kids Shows” i love to watch:

Today’s thursday’s 5 is based on one of the oft denied joys of parenting: Kid’s shows! We all watch them, few of us will admit it and most of us love at least one or two.

This is my list of 5 shows i sit through with my kids (and occasionally without them) that i love and the reasons why:

1) Clone Wars

This is an easy one. There are space battles. Light Sabers. Explosions. Aliens. R2-D2. Yoda. Obi-Wan. On and on an on!

Sure for those of us who are Star Wars purists (episodes IV,V &VI = YAY; I, II & III = bleh) many of the story lines should be held suspended outside the  “official” Star Wars universe history, but it’s still good fun to watch!

2) Pokemon

Sure this is Old School kid’s programing, but it’s still awesome! Pikachu is the cutest electronically charged rat-beast to ever open up a can of whup…. well, you know.

The early seasons are hands down better, but i’ll still watch the newer ones. i’ve never sat through one of the Pokemon movies and felt like i wasted an hour and a half.

Thank you Charizard, Bulbasaur, Mew, Entei, Jigglypuff and crew for entertaining me (while simultaneously enraging certain religious types who were so sure you were “pocket demons”- “teaching our kids to summon creatures to do their bidding”!- you guys do remember that, right?)

3) Avatar: The Last Airbender:

You want Kung-Fu action that makes the best Wire-Fu movie look like a chick flick? Avatar (not the big blue semi-naked CGI James Cameron brain children) is your animated answer to that desire!

It has everything you’ve always wanted in an action adventure but didn’t know you did: Giant flying bison, totally bad kids with glowing arrows on their bodies, people who can throw slabs of granite like 8 year olds chuck snow-balls in January.

4) Spongebob:

Sure, he’s old… And my kids only watch Spongebob sporadically. But after all these years he’s still making me giggle. (even when Focus on the Family accuse him and Patrick of being a homosexual couple… or maybe ESPECIALLY when Focus on the Family accuse them of being a homosexual couple)

5) Phineas and Ferb

This is probably my current favorite of my kid’s shows to watch with them. The first few times i watched it i wasn’t all that impressed with it, but the continually running sub-plots and entertaining musical numbers keep me watching time and time again.

If you tune in for your first show take note that:

Perry, their pet platypus always battles Dr. Doofinsmirtz.

Perry (aka: agent P) also makes a mind-numbingly complete transformation from moron to secret agent with just the addition of his Indiana-Jones-esque hat.

Also, the boy’s mother attend a cooking class with Doofinsmirtz ex-wife.

Their sister is always trying to expose their many flamboyant inventions to their mother; her attempts are always foiled by Agent P & Doofinsmirtz spy-on-evil-scientist battles (inadvertently of course)

Keep in mind that other than the platypus the family is completly unaware of Doofinsmirtz existence.

Add to that Doofinsmirtz’s daughters ever-foiled attempts at exposing him as an evil genius to his ex-wife….

And nearly every show has all this layered cleverness written into the plot!

Did i mention the musical numbers, which make me as giddy as a Glee-tard the night of the Glee season premiere.

Well, there’s 5 programs targeted at kids that i love to watch. There are other shows my kids have introduced me to, but these are my top 5 aimed specifically at their age groups. Of course much of their TV viewing pleasure lately includes My Name is Earl, GhostHunters (yeah, i’m a rock-solid model of Christian parenting) and countless hours of The Military Chanel (i’ve become an expert on the Battle of Bastogne).

Last night (thursday, the day i’m supposed to post) i loaded up and drove to Greensboro NC. Just to watch a movie that was originally released in 1987.

The Carousel was holding a special screening of The Princess Bride, the greatest movie ever filmed, shown, released on VHS & Beta Max, then later to DVD and now even to Blue-ray or digital copy!

Why would i make a 4 hour round-trip to watch an hour and a half movie that is older than Katie Couric’s triathlete tadpole? Because it could be the single most influential movie in my life!- a fact that i didn’t realize until i was in the theater last night. It was totally worth all that time in a car. Totally worth the environmental dent of wasting the fossil fuel it took to haul my carcass there and back again!

i found myself “8-year old on Christmas eve” giddy when the lights finally dimmed on the packed out theater. i love life, i drink it in, i consume it, but-that giddy butterfly-in-the-gut feeling is something i don’t regularly get anymore. 34 years of brutal aging, 14 years in the church world and a failed marriage will cause a person to temper their enthusiasm a bit, bracing for disappointment. But, even though i’ve sat through the Princess Bride hundreds of times, it delivered. There is a magic that you only get from the big screen. Moments of a movie i could nearly quote verbatim from opening  score to closing credits stood out to me like i’d never seen them as i watched them the way God & Rob Riener intended: larger than the average interstate billboard!

Like i said, last night i realized just how much of an impact this movie has had on my life. How much habitual consumption during my formative years molded me into who i am today. A friend recently confessed to me that they never understood The Princess Bride until they got to know me, and now they admit that it’s a great movie! i joked that i’m a sort of Princess Bride incarnate, a joke at first… but maybe more true than i realized when i said it.

The influencers in my life, listed by measure of impact would probably be:

> Parents/Jesus

> Westley, Inigo & Fezzik

> J.R.R. Tolkien (Frodo & Gandalf especially) -Man i’m a dork!

> All those school teachers, clergy, etc. etc. etc… Who have done their song and dance in my life.

So in honor of a true cinematic masterpiece i gush over my movie-crush with a Princess Bride themed list:

5 life-philosophies i learned from a lifetime of studying the Tao of Westley:

1) “I’m not left-handed”: The way of the weak hand:

We all know it, simultaneously the greatest and most ridiculous sword fight scene of the ages: Westley & Inigo duel it out on the plateau castle ruins atop the cliffs of insanity. They each in turn reveal to the other that they are not left handed, switching their sword to their dominant hand & escalating their melee.

There is a lot to be said for sword fighting left-handed in life (or right handed if you do happen to be a southpaw). It’s the idea of never really showing your hand. When people think they know all you have in your bag of tricks, you have really only dipped into the top 1/3.

It’s what another friend of mine once referred to as “The Mayberry Effect”. He accused me, rightfully, of letting people think i was less intelligent than he assessed me to actually be.

It’s not caring where other people rank you, because you know it’s to your benefit to be underestimated. Don’t be afraid to be underestimated in life, if people underestimate you in life you can only amaze them from there, if you oversell yourself and get overestimated then the only thing you can deliver is disappointment, and in life you’re going to deal out enough of that without any help doing it.

2) “Both cups were poisoned, i’ve spent the last year building up an immunity to iocane powder.”: The way of the screw-your-rules

Westley & Vizzini face off in a battle of wit, even though it falls under the two classic blunders:

1. Don’t get involved in a land-war in Asia.

2) Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

The challenge: Westley claims to poison one of two cups of wine, the game ends when Vizzini picks & they both drink. The reality; BOTH cups are poisoned because Westley has built an immunity to the poison.

Life, socially speaking, is a long chain of social games. We all play them. We get in a car and try to decide who the Alpha male is, typically by wrestling over control of the ipod hookup- Alpha is the one who’s ipod gets hooked up and played.

We volunteer to drive, not because we are altruistically inclined to chauffeur  our friends around BUT because he who holds the keys has the trump card on the schedule for the night.

On and on and on. We tell the best stories at the office, we have the nicest laptop, we build a bigger house, we flex whatever authority we are deluded into thinking we have in life (authority is really a sort of illusion- if you are not afraid of death or incarceration you can literally do ANYTHING you want).

Westley teaches us the value of letting people think we are playing by their rules. As long as people think we are playing their games they feel comfortable. In life you will have to play games. Just remember, that’s what they are- games. Monopoly comes with a booklet of rules to play by, but that doesn’t stop me from using the pieces to produce my own “thimble/hat/little dog theater” Or seeing how high i can stack red hotels. Or trying to buy a happy meal with banana yellow money.

3) “Life is pain, anyone who tells you differently is selling something.”: The way of Yes sometimes life sucks.”

Someone infinitely smarter than me once said that in life we would have trials. (Yes “Mr. Bible Scholar” i know that was Jesus.)

Life is full of pain.

Life is not fair (thank you dad for drilling that mantra into my gray-matter)

Life is not easy.

You will have to trade dreams for paychecks.

You will cry yourself to sleep, probably on more than one night.

You will, at times, think that death is preferable to living the life you have.

BUT: there is a certain stoic strength you can tap into when you embrace the inevitable. You will have some pain in life. It’s unavoidable. & ultimately every life needs at least one good tragedy to really be full.

As i have said (to the exasperation of friends) for years: Life is hard, then you die.

4)“It’s not somewhere i’d like to build a summer home, but it is quite lovely.” The way of Beauty in Darkness:

During their brief tour of the Fire Swamps; surrounded by fire spurt, lightening sand and R.O.U.S.s; Westley tells Buttercup that the swamp is really quite nice. His response to her disbelief is that statement, not a place he would build a summer home but it’s still pretty nice.

Life is often hard (see #3: The way of Yes sometimes life sucks), but even when it’s at it hardest, crappiest, most dismal points; life is worth living.

Even when we are surrounded by despair and misery life is still pretty wondrous.

Sunsets are still gorgeous

Clouds are still amazing multi-ton water vapor marvels

Puppies are still cure

Kittens are still kickable

Sweet Tea is still sweet

The Hot Donut sign still flickers on at Krispy Kreme

Bacon still tastes good

Cheers is still on TV

Japanese game shows are still ridiculously amazing

Books still have that comforting heft when you pick them up

Flash Games are still free to play online

Good stuff is still out there.

People say “Every dark cloud has a silver lining”

Well that’s stupid! Clouds don’t have silver linings, if a dark cloud is producing anything that looks remotely silver it’s called lightening! Don’t touch it!

But life is meant to be lived. So even when life sucks- embrace whatever adventure it offers up to you.

5) “We are men of action, lies do not become us.” The way of Action

That line awakened something in my pre-pubescent male heart. i wanted to grow up to be a man of action.

Part of me wishes i could say that i never lie. But that would be a lie. We all lie. Frequently.

If you want me to stop lying, stop asking me what i think of the Jonas Brothers, or if i like your shirt, or how i’m doing on Sunday morning- it’s Sunday morning! The morning we are bio-mechanically designed to sleep till 11:30. But NO! i’m in a big building, filled with moderately comfortable seating where we will spend the next several hours together as i attempt to sing-a-long in group karaoke OR listen to choir music… choir. music. Do you know how many choir CDs i own? If you said Zero you are correct. Then i spend the next 30-50 minutes (we are Pentecostal) feverishly battling my ADD as someone speaks to me, or if i’m really lucky (& you’re not) i spend the next 25-35 minutes feverishly battling my ADD as you listen to me speak to you!

But aside from our socially accepted norms for untruthfulness i have adopted the way of action. For me it goes like this:

Talk is cheap. Deeds are not.

Also known as: Put up or shut up.

You can say whatever you want, anyone can say the right things. We can talk about loving our neighbor, doing the right thing, being a good guy, a hard worker. But it’s all just talk.

Do don’t Say.

There are many more lessons to Glean from this masterpiece. i know i shouldn’t have said half of what i said in this post to more than half of you. For many of you it’s just ammunition to use in your arguments against me, or your fruitless attempts to “fix” me.

But the older i get, the less i care about those things.

i am who i am.

Jesus finds a way to deal with me, you can too.

So. Rent the movie, buy the movie, DVR the movie when it comes on TBS next week.

And remember: if you don’t get The Princess Bride, you probably won’t get me.

How are these two unrelated things connected in Tony-Land?

they reflect two of my passions: Biking & cooking. Both of which were way-laid by mechanical failures, biking by a razor sharp chunk of asphalt, cooking by too-stiff cream cheese that strained my blender to a very early grave.

We all have things that we are passionate about. So many of my friends have these twitter-sations about coffee grounds & grinding coffee & putting coffee in boiling water & main-lining coffee & the best blends to put in your IV drip & on & on & on.

Coffee moves them.

It shapes them.

It shapes what they think about.

It shapes the meth-lab-esque paraphernalia they spend their money on to concoct their dark caffeine laden draughts with.

Stuff moves me, here’s a worthless list of 5 things that i’m passionate about:

1) Biking

2) Cooking

3) Music

4) Books

1. Tea (real tea, not that duff you get at the grocery store)

My passions affect me & the way i view the world, to me it’s not crazy at all to spend more on a bicycle than a car. i’d love copper cookware that would cost me a whole paycheck. i really need that much space on my ipod. My bedroom looks like a book-mobile overturned in it. i tend to buy my tea loose leaf, by the ounce and at a premium price.

Someone once told me, “Show me your bank statements & i can tell you what’s important to you.”

You could also say, show me how you spend your time and i’ll show you what’s important to you.

Two question i ask myself (& you my friends): What’s really important in my life? Are the things i hold to be important really worthwhile? Where does my love of music & cycling stack up against my spiritual life?

What are some of your passions in life? i’d love to know. Not for any real good reason, but just because i’m a curious booger.

5 Things my Mom’s recent battle with cancer have shown me or reminded me of:

1) My mom is possibly the most selfless person i know:

My mom spent over 9 hours Monday either in surgery, pre-op or recovery. When she finally was carted into her room my dad, my mom’s sister & me waited patiently in the hallway as the nurses got her settled in so we could see her.

She had just endured major surgery, life saving surgery! Was still wrestling against the grip of anesthesia and as the three of us tentatively gathered around her bed she looked at my dad and asked him this question:

“Are you ok?”

“Yeah,” he replied.

She looked up at her sister, “Are you ok?”

“Yeah,” she smiled back

Then to me, “Are you ok?”

“Really Mama! You are not allowed to ask me that question right now!”

Here is the real kicker: she wasn’t being polite or clever, she really wanted to make sure we were all ok! She has to be the most selfless person i personally know. Her other conversation revolved around making sure we had eaten while she was in surgery, fussing at me for worrying, and giving my older sister strict instructions to take me out for dinner (even though i’m 34)!

i hope that one day i will genuinely care for other people the way my mother cares for others

2) We use humor to deal with stress

i’ve always wondered where i got my #1 coping tool from, disarming nerves with humor, and when i watched my immediate family dealing with mom’s serious surgery i saw it in action. We all spent a long, nervous day migrating around the surgery waiting room, eating hospital cafeteria food & flipping through magazines we would otherwise never have cracked the cover on. The thing i noticed that seemed to set us apart from the other people in the waiting area was the fact that our family circle had much more laughter than any of the others.

It wasn’t that we were ok with mama being operated on, we were all bundles of nerves. It’s just that we cope with stressful times by keeping our spirits afloat with laughter.

Humor is such an important part of dealing with pain for me, and my family, and i’m glad. i hope we laugh through every surgery, every tragedy, every struggle. i hope that when people gather around my cold dead body to celebrate/berate my life that there is plenty of laughter in the room.

3) My family is Stoic by nature

It wasn’t until all this went down with my mother that i really realized that stoicism is a family trait, along with male-pattern baldness and a fiery temper. That thought actually hit me when i was speaking to a room full of youth leaders at a retreat a few weekends ago. i was blown away, all of my friends who were there responded to my revelation with some variance of, “DUH”.

When i asked my mom, via telephone, a few days before the surgery how she was with it all she replied, “I’m really ok, this is just something I have to do and there is no way around it.”

My former mother-in-law once told me that if there is a problem you are powerless to affect, then don’t waste your energy fretting over it. All my life my mom and dad have faced difficulties with a staid, quiet reserve. i’m sure that somewhere that’s where i wound up adopting “Cest la vie” as my life-mantra.

4) The power of presence

Sometimes in life you have no clue what to say to people. At funerals, after a breakup or divorce, when the diagnosis comes back bleak, in the waiting room. But one thing life has taught me, and recent events have reminded me of is: the power of presence.

There is just a comfort that comes when the right people are around you, when no words are there, their physical presence becomes the support you need.

Although, sometimes, you just want to be left alone, finding the right balance between being there, and being available is a tricky road to navigate, but one well worth the effort.

5) Compared to cancer (aka real problems) most of the other “Stuff” we worry about is insignificant and trivial

We get our drawers in a wad over so many things; someone said this, i can’t get the tv i want, they don’t like me…

We expend the bulk of our energies fretting over problems that don’t even deserve our attention. When our daily bumps in the road are laid side by side with the real problems life throws at us they seem ridiculous. i hope that’s something i can remember when the big problems aren’t so front and center.