I dreamed again last night. I dream fairly often, but I only occasionally remember them in detail enough to share. A few of my dreams have been told and retold even by others since my college days. The one about the giant squirrel and the other about the Devil's Nachos are my favorites.
But I digress. This dream was one of the recurring ones. I've had a recurring theme all my life where I discover a room/apartment/cave where there wasn't one before and finding it is so...cool. The feeling I have as I walk into that space is adventure and mystery and excitement--even if all I find there is some crazy Hawaiian shirts (which in that particular dream world were actually Mexican shirts). Some of these rooms are attached to specific places. There is a secret room in the attic of Mr Morley's house in the town where I grew up. The entrance is behind the pool table--when its there at all--and its full of candlelit beds with frilly canopies. There is also a secret cave branching off the entrance to Subway Caverns near Redding, CA. That dream was so real that I mentioned it to some friends who were in the dream as if it had actually happened. It took another visit before I was fully convinced it wasn't real.
This one was an apartment. It isn't attached anywhere, but its at the top or at the back of a large apartment building. In the last dream I was contemplating moving to that apartment, but even in my dream I'd wonder if I'd be able to find it again after I left. This time I was looking for our missing pillow. We lost a pillow somewhere in the 1/4 mile move into our new house. I never found it, but my wife was there--an unusual occurrence in itself--as well as a very billowy set of the aforementioned hawaiian shirts that were actually mexican shirts.
What do these dreams mean? A quick search of online "dream dictionaries" tells me I'm discovering or exploring a new aspect of my personality. I'm not really sure what that means exactly, having the personality that I do, but it sounds cool. Trouble is, I can't really think of any new aspects of my personality that I hadn't known about already.
The other option to the room theme focused on my feelings about the room. Feelings of excitement when entering the room are supposed to represent satisfaction about life. This one seems a little more relevant, as I am supremely satisfied with my life these days. I have a great job with a great boss and coworkers, my newly decorated little house looks awesome, I am actually planting a garden with brick planters and everything, I love my new town, my wife is even more beautiful, exciting, patient, kind, loving, intelligent, radiant, talented and amazing to me then she was when we got married.
So I guess that's what the dream means. I'm happy with life. I've found that passageway that leads to joy that isn't always there and may not be again. Its a feeling that's so real and vivid, but hard to explain and even the memory of it flees too quickly leaving behind only oddly floraled shirts and canopied beds. But I talk about it and write about it in the hopes that those details will remain. That when the wall behind the pool table no longer opens to a staircase we together will be able to remember what it was like when it did.
I'm still looking for that pillow though.
8/31/10
8/20/10
Data Type Error
I spent all day with a computer today. It's a database I've been working on for my newest place of employment. I cannot wait for it to be done because so many cool things will be possible when it is. So I chained myself to my desk and stared at query grids and code for nearly eight straight hours. For the second day in a row. When I got home I told my wife that I think I need to spend some time doing something else tomorrow because I think I'm losing my humanity. To deal with computers, one has to learn to think like them. And computers are very black and white, literal and particular creatures. Anal you might even say--though my mother would not approve if you did.
Needles to say, this style of thinking is not all that compatible when dealing with actual people instead of personified ones. If I were to tell my wife with a blank look on my face that she committed a "stack overflow error" by putting too much food on my plate and then refused to eat anything before she cooked the meal over again from scratch, I would probably be "shut down" until I installed a few "upgrades."
It occurred to me as I sat here tonight that many of us approach God in the same way. We know exactly what his specifications are, what he should be capable of, but we find ourselves unable to harness that power because we realize that we just aren't "god" people. Or maybe we were taught to do a few things with God back in the day and we don't really want or think we need any of those fancy new features he's got now. I've seen this kind of thing between people and their computers. There is a disconnect at a very basic level, an incompatibility of thought that stands between man and machine that is kind of sad when you stop to consider what could be accomplished if that gulf could be spanned.
Of course if you're already a christian, you've immediately thought of the problem of sin, and you're right. That gulf will never be jumped without the cross. But after salvation we need to continually remind ourselves that God is not a machine. That particular incompatibility doesn't have to exist been us and God. But it will as long as we insist on reducing our god to a list of concise doctrines and our relationship with him to a step by step process.
You will lose your humanity if you spend your life trying to understand who God is and how to use him. But you will find it again when you desire to know him as the person he is: complexities, ambiguities and all.
blog.completed = true
End blog
Needles to say, this style of thinking is not all that compatible when dealing with actual people instead of personified ones. If I were to tell my wife with a blank look on my face that she committed a "stack overflow error" by putting too much food on my plate and then refused to eat anything before she cooked the meal over again from scratch, I would probably be "shut down" until I installed a few "upgrades."
It occurred to me as I sat here tonight that many of us approach God in the same way. We know exactly what his specifications are, what he should be capable of, but we find ourselves unable to harness that power because we realize that we just aren't "god" people. Or maybe we were taught to do a few things with God back in the day and we don't really want or think we need any of those fancy new features he's got now. I've seen this kind of thing between people and their computers. There is a disconnect at a very basic level, an incompatibility of thought that stands between man and machine that is kind of sad when you stop to consider what could be accomplished if that gulf could be spanned.
Of course if you're already a christian, you've immediately thought of the problem of sin, and you're right. That gulf will never be jumped without the cross. But after salvation we need to continually remind ourselves that God is not a machine. That particular incompatibility doesn't have to exist been us and God. But it will as long as we insist on reducing our god to a list of concise doctrines and our relationship with him to a step by step process.
You will lose your humanity if you spend your life trying to understand who God is and how to use him. But you will find it again when you desire to know him as the person he is: complexities, ambiguities and all.
blog.completed = true
End blog
8/1/10
The Good Stuff is on the Top Shelf
No.
That is what I am saying to the force that is keeping me from writing in this blog for nearly a month.
No. Not one more day.
So, um, what to write about? I hate it when people write blogs about not having anything to write. But in my defense, we really only hate things in other people that remind us of ourselves. That, and this is totally just an exercise to sit me down and get me to start writing--in the desperate hope that something awesome will flow out of my fingertips. Kind of like when you turn on the tv on saturday afternoon in sheer desperation for entertainment and your favorite movie is just starting on That Movie Show For People With No Life. I'm staring at my keyboard right now, wondering how the awesomeness would affect the delicate inner workings of my computer and hoping it fares better than my camera did in the Pacific Ocean.
Ah, the Pacific Ocean. I saw a map today at a church we visited that had the good ol' PC in the middle of the map instead of the usual wrap-around-the-edges treatment it usually gets. Seems like the Atlantic Ocean would have been a better candidate for that, but it did provide a nice empty spot in the middle of the planet for their sign. I feel like I can relate a little bit to the PC. (That's right, we're on an initials-only basis now). I mean, PC always gets the wrap-around just because it happens to be the widest body of water on the planet. And since nobody's bothered to map that giant ocean of trash that's floating somewhere in the middle, then there's really no reason to include anything between Hawaii and New Zealand. It goes the same for me. Being a tall guy, I'm always in the back for pictures, always in the front seat of the car, always being hunted for by small old ladies in grocery stores who only buy things off the top shelf.
But this is my lot in life. Or should I say, these are our lots in life. It could be worse. Nobody even remembers the Arctic Ocean even exists--heck the Antarctic Ocean is still fighting for the right to call itself that. And I, well, I could be short for one. Or still unemployed, poor, starving, or living in Nevada. It could always be worse. Being content in life is really just a matter of perspective, isn't it? The sweet spot is just above average--doing better than most but not so much as to appear snobby or have to work too hard to stay there. And average is just a statistic. You can do whatever you want with statistics! So there. There's the secret to contentedness. A nice even 60%.
Well look at that. I started this thing with nothing to say and I ended up improving everyone's outlook on life. Sweet. Now does anyone know how to get awesomeness out of a keyboard? I think my "ggggggggggggggggggggggggg" Kgey isg stucgk.
That is what I am saying to the force that is keeping me from writing in this blog for nearly a month.
No. Not one more day.
So, um, what to write about? I hate it when people write blogs about not having anything to write. But in my defense, we really only hate things in other people that remind us of ourselves. That, and this is totally just an exercise to sit me down and get me to start writing--in the desperate hope that something awesome will flow out of my fingertips. Kind of like when you turn on the tv on saturday afternoon in sheer desperation for entertainment and your favorite movie is just starting on That Movie Show For People With No Life. I'm staring at my keyboard right now, wondering how the awesomeness would affect the delicate inner workings of my computer and hoping it fares better than my camera did in the Pacific Ocean.
Ah, the Pacific Ocean. I saw a map today at a church we visited that had the good ol' PC in the middle of the map instead of the usual wrap-around-the-edges treatment it usually gets. Seems like the Atlantic Ocean would have been a better candidate for that, but it did provide a nice empty spot in the middle of the planet for their sign. I feel like I can relate a little bit to the PC. (That's right, we're on an initials-only basis now). I mean, PC always gets the wrap-around just because it happens to be the widest body of water on the planet. And since nobody's bothered to map that giant ocean of trash that's floating somewhere in the middle, then there's really no reason to include anything between Hawaii and New Zealand. It goes the same for me. Being a tall guy, I'm always in the back for pictures, always in the front seat of the car, always being hunted for by small old ladies in grocery stores who only buy things off the top shelf.
But this is my lot in life. Or should I say, these are our lots in life. It could be worse. Nobody even remembers the Arctic Ocean even exists--heck the Antarctic Ocean is still fighting for the right to call itself that. And I, well, I could be short for one. Or still unemployed, poor, starving, or living in Nevada. It could always be worse. Being content in life is really just a matter of perspective, isn't it? The sweet spot is just above average--doing better than most but not so much as to appear snobby or have to work too hard to stay there. And average is just a statistic. You can do whatever you want with statistics! So there. There's the secret to contentedness. A nice even 60%.
Well look at that. I started this thing with nothing to say and I ended up improving everyone's outlook on life. Sweet. Now does anyone know how to get awesomeness out of a keyboard? I think my "ggggggggggggggggggggggggg" Kgey isg stucgk.
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