Giving back

At the end of probably one of the worst days I've had in a while, I decided I needed to look away from myself for a second.

The entire day had been less than enjoyable, and even the weather decided to get against me: it started snowing. (We might get up to 5 inches. . .)

When I decided to stop complaining, something told me to go outside. So I did, and it instantly hit me: build a snowman, and give it to someone.

So I built a snowman and put it in my neighbor's yard, where tomorrow the kids will see it when they go out to play.

From "the Bard of the Yukon" Robert W. Service

The Quitter

When you're lost in the Wild, and you're scared as a child,
    And Death looks you bang in the eye,
And you're sore as a boil, it's according to Hoyle
    To cock your revolver and . . . die.
But the Code of a Man says: "Fight all you can,"
    And self-dissolution is barred.
In hunger and woe, oh, it's easy to blow . . .
    It's the hell-served-for-breakfast that's hard.

"You're sick of the game!" Well, now, that's a shame.
    You're young and you're brave and you're bright.
"You've had a raw deal!" I know — but don't squeal,
    Buck up, do your damnedest, and fight.
It's the plugging away that will win you the day,
    So don't be a piker, old pard!
Just draw on your grit; it's so easy to quit:
    It's the keeping-your-chin-up that's hard.

It's easy to cry that you're beaten — and die;
    It's easy to crawfish and crawl;
But to fight and to fight when hope's out of sight —
    Why, that's the best game of them all!
And though you come out of each gruelling bout,
    All broken and beaten and scarred,
Just have one more try — it's dead easy to die,
    It's the keeping-on-living that's hard.

And the Sky Darkened

Looking towards the South. My backyard in Shallowater, Texas

(click on the pictures to view larger)
My room had a weird earth color to it, reflected from outside. I smelled dust and my nose was runny all day. The next morning I blew my nose and it came out bloody.

I never thought I'd live in West Texas.

There was a time in which I considered applying to Texas Tech here in Lubbock, but I never did. The thought of living out in the middle of nowhere didn't sit well with me at the time. What was I going to do in the middle of dustfields?

Granted, where I ended up and the snow storms there are the other end of the spectrum. The very next day I arrived in Texas for Christmas break, there was a small dust storm. I was amazed at how much dust was picked up. My mom and siblings told me that was not the worst it had been at all. . .

A couple of days after that, I checked weather.com and was surprised to see a warning I had never seen before: Dust Storm Warning, beginning at 11:00 AM. As in, Dust Storm Warning. (Ironically, I had seen a PBS documentary on the dust bowl not three weeks prior when I arrived for Thanksgiving.)

I could see the sky getting brown towards the west, so I ran out side with my camera and saw this . . .

. . . the storm was closer than I thought. The train tracks at the end of the road there are less than a quarter of a mile away, and as you can see, the dirt has begun encroaching this side of the tracks.

I snapped the photo and flew back to my house in a speed I haven't hit since High School. I admit I may have overreacted, screaming bloody murder at the top of my lungs: "Train tracks! The storm is at the train tracks!"

I'm sure any neighbor who heard me merely smiled and said, "Foreigners."

Within five minutes, all doors and windows were shut tightly and my family got back to business. This was all new material for me, and I just couldn't stop looking out the windows.

Here's about five minutes after the "train tracks" incident:

That's my backyard, and you can notice the sky isn't the normal clear blue of the Great Plains. The whole place had a weird red color to it, and I realized that there were worse things than the snowstorms we get in Nebraska.

As the day wore on, things only got worse. The wind blew harder and harder and only picked more dust up.

All I could think about was the Dust Bowl. They say that the sky went black during these storms, that candles were lit. I could not imagine living in a time when all you saw when you went outside was sand and a dust storm would hit you fairly regularly.

After some time, I went around and looked at the windowsills. What surprised me was that, even though they were tightly shut and had plastic sealer going around it, dust still crept through and there was a thin film of it all across the sill.

Here's looking out my window looking north, in front of my house:

As with any storm of any sort, there is a time where it is the thickest. At the height of it, here's how things looked:

For a glorious second, the sun grew a bit brighter. . .

. . . but all it did was make things more dreadful.


The storm didn't quite clear up until after the sun had gone down, and I was taken aback. Apparently, it had been one of the worst storms the Lubbock area had seen in a while, and there ended up being many accidents on the roads.

Then I got to thinking about the Dust Bowlers again.

If I were them, with a house with no plastic sealant on the windows, much less on the doors, with no crops to sustain the family/sell, I would have picked everything up and left. Many did, but to the ones that stayed I tip my hat.

Why I'm not a Religionist, IV

Continuing on the premise of the ending thoughts of the last WINAR I wrote . . .

When I don't love Jesus as much as I should, I turn to religion to fill me up.

Maybe that's why Jesus never implicitly preached a sermon on the state of the dead. He confused people when he talked about Jairus' daughter being asleep, but he never went into the nitty-gritty.

Maybe that's why Jesus never implicitly preached a sermon on the relevance and infallibility of the Torah. He quoted it and used it profusely, but he never defended it in a sermon.

Maybe that's why when I, feeling empty inside and maybe a little wanting, look at how I went over the amount of worships I was supposed to go to this semester and feel good about myself.

Maybe that's why I don't always feel the urge to go out and preach (scary, huh?).

Maybe that's why I don't know what I would say to people I meet in the street.

P. Herrera was walking down an interstate to the next town looking for a mechanic because his truck was broken. My dad and I gave him a lift. Yet in all the time he was in the car with us I never mentioned Jesus. On one hand I felt good about this "good deed," but on the other--was he able to figure out I am a Christian?

Or the time I gave some cereal to some people stranded on the road, or the time I put money in the bin of a raggedy-tobacco-smelling-bell-ringing Salvation Army volunteer when I was with my friends--do they and people that saw that know that I'm a Christian?

I came to the conclusion that I'm not going to call myself a Christian anymore, because that is a label that others should bestow on me. Plenty of "Christians" have muddied Jesus' name, myself included.

But when I love Jesus, for real love Jesus, I won't need to turn to my good deeds checklist or my Bible verses known or my attendance to round-table discussions and seminars.

I'm not saying I won't need to know the state of the dead or other doctrine, but it would now be easier for me to know what to say.

Because I won't be trying to convert them.

Because I won't be trying to check off doctrines taught to that person.

Because I won't be trying to enslave them in my personal religious system.

Because I won't be reading a script of what I should say when the door opens.

Because I won't have anything to say, rather God will speak through my love for Him translated into what I do for them, not out of obligation or to make myself feel good, will set them free from the chains they have, be it poverty, hunger, depression, friendlessness, or even making a perfectly happy person feeling good about themselves.

It would set me free, too, from trying to conform to my personal religious system.

From trying to convert others.

From making service a burden.

From reading a script of what to say when the person rejects the cookbook.

From the realization that I do not feel the urge to go out and preach because I am preaching with my actions.

Or maybe I'm just crazy.

Not much to say. . .until now.

It has been 14 days since I last posted anything, and the last post was me killing time in between assignments. The one before took two seconds to write. And the one before was a poem I wrote on that painting that I had to turn in to my Arts and Ideas class. So it's been a while since I've posted anything substantial originally for this blog . . . although only Elena and my dad would have noticed anyway.

Still, I have had entirely too much to do over the past three weeks, and now that I finished that I began to recharge. As I promised myself, I bought myself a book now that the semester is over. I couldn't choose between Crime and Punishment and Les Miserables, so at random I got Les Mis. I have started both of these before but never finished them.

I have all of a sudden have become aware of a major movie/musical based on Les Mis coming out on Christmas day. This gave me an idea.

I have challenged myself to finish all 1462 pages of Les Mis before the movie is scheduled to come out, so here I go. Wish me luck!

Once again . . .(or, Random Rant, VII)

. . . nearing the end of the semester, I find that what I had planned out didn't go the way I thought it would.

Still, I know I accomplished more than I set out to. Honestly, the fact that everything didn't go as expected is sobering and necessary. As I've said before, I tend to dream a little big, and while there's no problem with that my dreams are--more often than not--leaning towards the "un-realistic" side.

Since they are a bit unreal, it gives me the opportunity to see how the real stuff happens before my very eyes, sometimes even better than I had imagined in my huge dream.

As this is being written, I am in my office waiting for an update on the design of the last Clocktower of the semester. My phone's just about dead, I got locked out of my office for the umpteenth time (when I finally got my door opened again, my keys were sitting there on my desk, almost non-chalantly), and just pondering as I peruse my Facebook feed and (unconsciously) listen to Coldplay's "Green Eyes".

 Also subconsciously, until now, I've been making good use of a stress ball in shape of a person I acquired yesterday. Poor thing was white, but now is yellow. I'm not sure why, I cleaned it off with a Clorox wipe and it got worse. At least it's not my hands that made it yellow.

One of those times...

when all I've ever read, on any subject, cannot help me one bit.
haha