When I was reading this ask.metafilter.com thread the other day, something I’ve been thinking about for a while finally clicked. What caught my eye was that a few respondents mentioned the volume of music, in gigabytes, that they had downloaded from emusic.com back when it offered unlimited downloads.

When I was growing up, our house was located at the very top of the Guadalupe river valley. We had a spectacular view to the southeast all the way across Canyon Lake to the other side of the county.
When I played trombone in middle school and high school, my parents made me practice outside (not a problem, since we had few neighbors). I remember the awesome echoes that I got with that. I would blast a loud short sound and just listen to the echoes.
Also, at one point we had a religious cult living in the old ranch house a couple of miles away. My friends and I would get on the garage with a telescope and spy on them, though we never saw anything extraordinarily weird take place.

Samuel has recently become a big Ben Folds fan. It started when Samuel discovered that Ben has a song with ‘Stan’ in the title. So, now when he listens to my iPod, he asks for ‘the Stan song.’ I carefully excluded this song from the playlist that Samuel listens to, but this past weekend, Samuel pointed out that I’d missed one song with objectionable lyrics. So, if Samuel starts using the F word, I guess I can just blame it on Ben Folds.

This MSNBC news article about cold-war era civil defense supplies having been found at the Brooklyn Bridge dredged up a childhood memory. I remember eating lemon hard candies that I thought were from civil defense caches. A quick Googling confirmed that they probably were indeed from a fallout shelter. The ones I remember were just like the yellow candies shown on this page.
The candies that I remember probably came from the grain elevator in Wichita, Kansas, that my maternal grandfather managed, which was a fallout shelter–though I’m not sure how the candies got from the shelter to my grubby little mouth.

Sorry the entries have been sparse around here lately. No particular reason; I’ve just been more focussed on day-to-day issues. Stay tuned.

So, Katie IMs me from home and mentions that our home (VoIP) telephone is not working. I respond: “So, is Internet access out also?” A second later I realize I asked her this via IM.

A small cool front moved through last night, bringing with it a thunderstorm and a little fresh, clear air. It made for glorious running weather this morning. I ran about eleven miles around Town Lake and up through west Austin (through Tarrytown to 35th, across MoPac and back down Shoal Creek).
At Auditorium Shores, I noticed on the side of the path a parked bike and an empty guitar case. A few yards later, Woode Wood was serenadiing the sunrise over Town Lake and downtown. I didn’t stop to listen to him, but just his presence there made my morning brighter.

This afternoon, I spent some time browsing through Crap Cars at Barnes & Noble. This little not-terribly-witty book profiles about 50 of the worst cars sold in the U.S. during the driving lifetime of your average B&N customer–the last 40 years or so. I was dismayed, though not surprised, to find in this book two cars that I’ve owned:
1980 Chevrolet Citation

1975 Ford Mustang II

I really dislike Valentine’s Day. I don’t mind telling or showing my loved ones how much they mean to me, but Valentine’s Day just seems like a totally artificial holiday. I’m anti-consumerist (to some small degree) and just generally passive aggressive. I don’t like anyone telling me that I must show my love on this day, and that I really ought to do so by buying specific (overpriced) items.
This morning, a well-meaning elderly lady was coming out of the coffee shop as I was going in. She asked me, out of the blue, “Have you gotten a Valentine’s Day gift yet for your wife? You’d better get on it. You should have seen all the men at the grocery store across the street.” It took a lot of restraint not to tell her to go to hell. I know she was just trying to be nice, but she really rubbed me the wrong way.

I did my graudate education in literary/cultural theory in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which means I was thoroughly immersed in deconstruction and post-structuralism: truth is relative, our thinking and reality are limited by language, human relations are all about power, etc. I was hit with Derrida in my first semester of grad school and the theories of Michel Foucault figured prominently in my dissertation.
Some would find it odd, then, that I became a Christian in the midst of this education, what with faith’s appeal to universal truth and the institutional nature of Christianity. I find deconstruction and post-structural theories interesting, useful and basically sound, but in retrospect, I think my embrace of faith represented an ultimate rejection of those theories. If you completely embrace those theories, the end result is hopelessness: we are each stuck in our own little reality–which itself might be an illusion–unable to genuinely communicate with others.
I guess I refused to go that far. I wanted and want to believe that there is some meaning to life. I’m not even sure that it’s God, but in a community of faith, I found a group of people who also want to believe that it’s possible to connect with others in a meaningful way (whatever that means).
Oh, I feel great ambivalence about the institutional nature of the church. And it’s damn hard to cut through all the crap that constitutes our daily lives to get to know others intimately, but at least the members of a faith community profess to believe it’s possible to do so. It’s that belief–that faith–that counts. And occasionally, I actually glimpse that connection.