03/16/2012

Well, hello. Another week gone.

I am officially “depressed Mizzou fan” tonight… sigh. Worst loss in school history probably. I feel bad for those seniors, such a great year and so many expectations and then, whack. Flat on your face.

Well… Bring on football season.

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The weekend at home last weekend was nice. It was good to be around the family. I got to watch a previous, less disappointing Missouri game with my dad and brothers, and of course the concert was really cool.

Before the concert I ran into an old friend, she is actually a college friend’s ex wife now. When they were married we were friends, but afterward everything was kind of weird and we don’t really talk anymore. It was good to see her, but kinda sad that the friendship is really not possible any longer, not in the way it was before anyway.

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I was sad to read about all that stuff that happened in Afghanistan with the soldier this week.

I meant to write a couple of months ago when those other guys were caught defaming the body of that enemy fighter that they had killed. Obviously, this situation is completely different, to harm children like that in any context is just unimaginable. Unbelievable.

With those soldiers before, who basically desecrated the body of someone who they had killed, while they shouldn’t have done it for sure, you can understand that in some far-off way. If this guy had just previously been trying to kill you, if you spent probably a few hours in horrifying fear and just… in an experience that thank God most of us never have to experience, honestly I can’t say how I would react in that situation or that I wouldn’t have been part of it. Have no idea how I would be over there.

War maims minds as well as bodies. There’s no telling what your mental state would be after months and months of people hiding behind rocks and shooting at you, setting bombs under your feet, all of that. My brother actually had a couple of friends he was roommates with for a time – guys from our high school – who he lived with after they came back from ‘the desert’ as they called it. They weren’t technically combat troops, they were mechanics who fixed broken down vehicles, including going out to pick them up in dangerous areas.

One of them seemed fine after he came back, but the other guy had some issues. The one that seemed fine actually was nicknamed ‘bomb-magnet’ for a while, because he always seemed to be in these convoys when someone tried to bomb them. I knew him in high school and he was a pretty hard guy anyway. He is the kind of guy you think of being a warrior, you know. I’ve never met this guy, but my brother knew someone else from our hometown who was involved in a major combat action over there that you would all know of if I said what it was, and supposedly he is fine now too. The other guy wasn’t, and my brother said he would pace up and down the hallways at night and have flashbacks and all of that. Eventually he went and got treated for the PTSD or whatever it was, and I think he’s doing okay now, but man. To have carried your brain through those situations and come out clean is some kind of fortune. How could you ever be fine?

I guess the only point is, previously all those situations kind of fell under the category of ‘war is hell’, not to sound cavalier, but war is what it is. This latest one… just horrible. Are we ever going to end this? We should either ramp this effort up 1,000 times and get the outcome we supposedly are after, or just get out if we aren’t committed to that. We need some leadership right now and the country really seems leaderless. And here it seems like another one is about to start. Bad news.

This is a tough time for the world. I guess you can look back at the last half century having just ended, Pax Americana as it were, and be grateful that the world enjoyed relative peace. Seems like we have a tough age coming up.

I wonder what the world will look like when I’m 50 or 70.

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Sorry, kind of a downer there.

In other news, it’s full blown spring here in Minnesota, and it’s never come this early according to all the old timers. I’m sitting here on the couch with my laptop, windows open, basketball tournament playing on the TV. Temperatures are dropping… would you rather be doing many things than writing by an open window with a cool breeze blowing on a spring night?

It would be hard to name too many things that are better.

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My mom seems to be doing fairly well, but she is probably looking at early retirement. She works as a clerk at the Post Office, and since the brain surgery she has recovered 95%, but she doesn’t quite have the feeling in her feet she used to or something, they say this will regenerate, but the nervous system is very slow to heal, so it might be a year or so. At any rate, she can’t be on her feet all day anymore, it’s just too tiring.

I think she will be happy to retire, and luckily my parents are both in industries where their retirement benefits are pretty good. She is thinking that she might take a year off to fully recover and then look for some light office work, like at a doctor’s office or something like that. I don’t think being off work for 4 months really kindled a great desire to work every day in her, can’t really blame someone who hasn’t worked in that long for getting used to it I guess.

I remember at her mom’s funeral, my grandmother – I think I wrote about tho – I heard an uncle of mine who is an older guy talking to another older guy about her. Her name was Marge. He said to the other guy, in his rural Missouri kind of way “…well, Marge was a good woman, she lived a long life, she raised a big family and she done a lot of hard work.” I think my mom has done all of those things. Raising kids the right way is a feat in today’s world, and she deserves a break I think.

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G, from two summers ago, has been floating around in my life again. I don’t feel like this is on the verge of dating again or anything, but we are so good as friends and we have so much in common on values and all of that, it almost makes too much sense.

But, to review history, she ended it with me and I was never totally read the list of reasons, so I’m not sure what (if anything) that she objected to before that has changed. Who knows.

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I’ve been reading this book, which she gave to me actually, about how we get our ideas about what love is supposed to be like and how that really sets us on a bad path from the start.

So basically, your primary influence is your parents’ relationship – makes sense I guess. But many people don’t get to see that, or get to see it healthy.

For me, my parents were always together and I can remember times when I was growing up that they were affectionate toward each other, they’d kiss or something and my brothers and I would make barf noises and they’d laugh. That kind of stopped when I got a little older, and their relationship wasn’t that great when I was in junior high and high school. I can’t pretend to analyze it. It just didn’t feel loving in the house anymore. And my mom and I didn’t get along so well, anyway. I don’t feel like my family picture of love and marriage was perfect.

Otherwise, where do you get your ideas growing up about what relationships are supposed to be? Music, movies – from Hollywood, basically. And how many people in Hollywood are successful in real life at romance, for the long term? Not that many.

I went through my college years and after, right up until recently, with the same idea. That the way you get love in your life is that you look around and find someone you think is attractive, and then you get to know them a little bit and see if you have found ‘the right person’. Then you give them life trials – introducing them to your friends and being a couple and all, trying to inch your way into what you think love should be. You start having sex or you move in together. The path that the whole world uses basically in the 21st century.

It’s really upside down though. We learn from Hollywood to go Physical > Emotional > Social/Relational > Sexual/Spiritual.

Well, it’s like – step 1 is ‘find the right person’. step 2 is fall in “love” (infatuation really). step 3 is to attach all your life to that person, fix all your hopes and purpose on them. step 4 is to start over if you fail, doing the same thing you always did.

Really step 1 should be, become the right person yourself. Step 2 should be to walk in that, live your life in yourself, live as a manifestation of what being the right person means.

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Ok, I guess I really enjoy writing by the window in the spring, because here I’ve done it for an hour.

Lehigh is gonna do it!