Well folks (both of you), it’s been a good run. My long-running blogging experiment has morphed significantly as my life has morphed – from Xanga with friends in high school to LiveJournal with friends in college to an anonymous Blogspot as I tried to sort out matters gay and Christian, finally to this much more public port of that into a sort of hodge-podge free for all. But I think it has come time to retire this experiment.

Not that there are no things left unsaid – on the gay front I never published any of my (preliminary and admittedly amateurish) research on the Greek words aresenokoitai and malakoi used in 1 Corinthians and Jewish and Early Christian attitudes about sex (both of these are actually really interesting); I never got around to dissecting Jerry Jenkins or Joe Dallas – both damaging and disturbed individuals. And in matters personal I never put up as many poems or musings as I thought I would. I left many possible researches into matters political and economical unturned.

But did any of that really need to be said on a blog, at its worst a time-consuming spilling of intellectual seed into the ether of the internet? The justification for blogging is either:

1) You have something important to say; or

2) It is an attempt to keep some sort of community with fellow bloggers and commenters across the world who are interested in some topic.

As to 1) I don’t think I have anything important to say – at least no more important than the average unblogged story – and at 23 there’s still far too much of life left undone for me to just speak my mind on topics du jour and assume it is worth it for the world to listen to me. (Although on some issues it is worth it.) The world has no shortage of young and tech-savvy self-proclaimed intelligentsia. And as to 2) I am too skeptical of Internet “community” to embrace it. I dabble, but I’m not an adherent. And it’s hard to justify removing my Facebook on the grounds that it fosters phony community with stale acquaintances, while at the same time keeping a blog.

The journal method was a somewhat better way to write letters to my future self, if I can keep diligent at it.

Not that I need to justify myself to you, internet-person. I’m just explaining, as we do on these strange blog things.

So in short order (i.e., when I get around to finishing it), I’m going to replace this site with a photo gallery of the photos I’m proudest of. Whether I’ll keep a link to this history or not I don’t know. I may keep it password-protected, or just bury it inside some sub-page. Remains to be seen. Also, as it’s the only thing I miss about Facebook, I’m keeping a tumblr to share links and cool things I find. Be warned – lots of global warming / nature destruction sadness.

As those who’ve kept in touch with me personally know, six months ago I was regularly doing yoga once – and sometimes twice – a week. For various reasons, I’m not doing yoga anymore (although I sometimes think about getting back into it). Despite yoga, I still have some of the tightest hamstrings on the planet, can’t touch my toes, and can’t do half moon. At least I got crow down.

Fast forward to this past week. I have some knots in my back that’ve been annoying me, variously, while working out or moving my arms in the wrong way. Thinking I could just get this “taken care of” like a routine physical check-up, I made an appointment for a massage this past Thursday. It was the first massage I’ve had. Although it was a good experience, the masseuse said (and I could tell) that I have a whole lot of tension, the type usually associated with stress (neck, shoulders, back, jaw; the tense hamstrings are who-knows-why). She made the comment afterward that she could’ve done a deep tissue massage but it would’ve been very painful on me because I hadn’t learned how to relax and receive a massage, and I would’ve been sore for days afterward and wouldn’t've liked it very much. She also said, finding that I work for Microsoft, that having a lot of Microsofties come through the spa, and being married to one, it is clearly a high-stress job and people who don’t figure out some way to deal with the stress, after ten or so years of it their body ends up being destroyed by it. This was not the first time I’d heard this (and I think I can point to people at the company who are examples of this).

I noticed a lot of similarity here to yoga practice. The point of yoga was to get to the end and do savasana, which allows your body to completely relax, after limbering up your muscles and tendons through yoga. Though there are various types of yoga, throughout it you are supposed to be focusing on your breathing, the impermanent and necessary taking and giving of breath, and going through the poses to loosen yourself up and be centered in your body and in your breath. Although they are of course radically different, both massage and yoga are meant to bring yourself back into your body and work on relaxing and loosening up all the various parts that are tight (usually because of stress, or just misuse). Then you start carrying that practice through the other parts of your life.

The point of all this, and something I’ve been learning, forgetting, and relearning over the past year, is that who we are is deeply tied up with our bodies. Learning to relax isn’t a purely mental exercise (as if there were some differentiation between mind and body), but it’s a physical exercise. Relieving stress isn’t an exercise on being mentally relaxed, it’s an exercise in healthiness. You are your body. I am my body. My personality is some combination of the biochemistry of my physical brain. What I do and how I act is some combination of the biology of my body interacting with the biology of my brain. That’s it. To be what I want to be, to be healthy and balanced and whole means affecting my body just as much as my brain. There are many different ways of being whole and balanced, and I have a pretty clear idea of the way I want and the way that suits me best, but it is a coherent symphony between body and mind, which are inseparably tied up together in that thing I call myself. I’m going to schedule some massages once or twice a month so I can get to the point of learning to be relaxed and undoing all the knots of stress I carry, usually without realizing it, to the detriment of my body an myself. And I may need to throw yoga back into the mix.

I failed at summitting Mt Adams this year. Adams is (for most people) a two-day summit, and I had been looking forward to doing this climb all summer. Granted, this was two months ago at this point, but it was very sad. I got altitude problems at our overnight campsite (called “the lunch counter” – lunch not included), and then was unable to continue after only a thousand feet or so the next day. I admitted to our hike leader that I wasn’t going to make it up (as if it wasn’t obvious from my falling further and further behind), who agreed that I wasn’t going to and we should head back down. The rest of the group – four guys in all – headed up, but the two of us started to turn back down. This alone was sad enough, but it was the next bit that was awful and embarrassing.

This past summer was unusually hot and came unusually early: the result being that the mountain was nearly-bare for our ascent. We did it without crampons, scrambling over the rocks just to the side of the remaining packed snow above the lunch counter. However, our camp leader brought crampons anyway and after I had decided to turn back, loaned me them to get back down to camp faster. I had never used crampons before and despite my friend giving me instructions and help with a couple of steps, within two minutes of stepping out onto the snow, I planted my foot, tried to turn it (feet in crampons don’t turn), and fell down and twisted my ankle.

Several expletives later, and after getting my bearings, I tried to get up off the snow. My friend was beside himself, certain it was his fault despite however many times I told him it wasn’t. But I was not walking long distances anytime soon. I found it impossible to put much weight on it, and I hop-moved off the packed snow and back to the rocks, where we made ourselves warm and tried to figure out what to do. After thirty minutes to an hour I was still unable to put weight on it and we called for assistance. It sounds simple but we spent a good fifteen or twenty minutes trying to get a cell signal, and then asking the emergency responders on the other side what to do, then waiting for a call back, then arranging for a ranger to come up and take a look, then waiting for another call back, and on and on and on.

So we waited. Nerve-wrackingly. It is cold to wait on the side of a mountain for hours (we were at about 10,800 feet if I recall). But we couldn’t've asked for better weather to have this happen in: clear skies and sunny, so we were at least heated by the sun. I took out my ankle and it was a little swollen (not as bad as I imagined – I had an identical injury on the same ankle the previous month playing tennis, and had a swollen knot the size of my fist for two days afterward) but it was still too sensitive to walk on. Eventually the ranger came up, and the rest of our party met us on their way down. The ranger looked at my ankle and tried to dress it but couldn’t do much. It would be tedious, long, and difficult to get a group up the uneven rock field to carry me off, and it would take at least half a day to get them in place, meaning it would be night or the next morning before the team could be up. Feeling the little nudge – or giant cattle prod – in my head not to be a wimp and be pulled off unless I were in the worst, most debilitating pain of my life, which this was decidedly not, I said that I would make it down. We made our way back to our campsite by glissading down the strip of packed snow that we had followed beside much of the way up. Besides being fast (and fun), glissading had the benefit of keeping my weight off my ankle for much of the way down.

We made it back to camp and my compatriots, as well as the ranger (who followed and assisted us all the way back down), were noble enough to take most of the weight of my things on their backs instead of mine, and we made our way down the five or six miles of trail to the parking lot. And I made it just fine – well, until the next day when my ankle swelled back up and hurt worse than the day before. But civilization has much more ibuprofen than the mountain wilderness.

What’s the moral of the story? A couple things:

1. To use a phrase I have only recently become acquainted with, I am athletically retarded. I come from a long lineage of tall, athletically retarded but athletically determined (and hence, accident-prone) men, and I am no exception. I know I have thin and fairly weak ankles and now I wear an ankle sleeve brace on the troublemaker whenever I know I’m going to be doing something demanding.

2. Rangers are awesome.

3. The five other guys I went with are hosses. Seriously. I wasn’t the only injured one, another friend had terribly blistered toes (not normal-blistered, made-my-skin-crawl-when-I-saw-it blistered) from his boots most of the way up and down. Another one had been on who-knows-how-many hikes and summits this year alone, and still another had summitted Kilimanjaro. And they were all both good company and kind.

4. I am trying again. Don’t know if it’ll be next year or not but I will summit it. I was less than 2000 (vertical) feet short of the top this year! Just because I’m athletically retarded doesn’t mean I’m gonna let that stop me – within reasonable limits. And next year I will know how to use crampons appropriately and go earlier in the season when there is more snow for a smoother ascent and descent.

If I were a being only slightly lighter I could lift myself above the earth and run my hands over the froth of the stratus clouds covering this country as running my fingers across the surface of a lake.  And if I were a being only slightly heavier I could descend into the sun and wrap myself in the deepest eddies and currents of its nuclear heart and let out a relaxing sigh as a man in a hot tub.  But I am a being neither heavy nor light; for I should pass through the clouds and the weight of the sun should crush me, and only water is my domain.

I cannot comprehend a bounded universe.  I am told it has an age, of a certain number of billion years.  I am told it has a width, of a certain number of billion light-years.  But I am small and long before a billion has any meaning it becomes infinite.  I cannot spread my arms and measure a billion anymore than I can spread my life and measure a billion.  I may believe in these numbers and figures, the way a man believes in the god of his father, but my heart tells me the universe is infinite.

What does it mean to me that the universe is infinite?  I am of a people and in a technological society that I might expect to live for eighty years.  If time is infinite, what are eighty years compared to two or to eighty-thousand?  Any life is only a breath in the crisp air, which is emitted as a formless fog, and perhaps if it is clever it begins to come together to make a shape, but in the end it must come apart and vanish.  But my heart knows it is better to live to be eighty than to live to be two.  How does it know this?  At two I have known so little of life.  I am nothing much more than the repository of what my environment has put into me.  I am still a child.  But I am twenty-two and think I only began to be an adult at twenty-one.  And it is still new to me, with a wide and an open domain still to be explored and understood.  What is sixty years of knowing, and ten in the prime, or perhaps twenty if I am strong?  But still it is better than only living to two, or to twenty-two.  If time stretches on and on, what does it mean to live for eighty-thousand years, and is it better than eighty?  In eighty years, most of it not at my prime, I can never truly understand what the best choice is.  Because of the shortness of it, most opportunities come only once.  Little is grasped, little is explored, only a series of baffling selections that must be made and lay incomparable one to the other: what is behind the one is left unknown and what is behind the other is a mystery only unwrapped after I choose it.  The soul may grow tired of life given long enough, and eighty-thousand years may be too long, but only those living in the harshest times – or those bitter and feeling trapped – have grown tired of life, and no one has lived enough to see if there is a limit upon the possibilities of its freshness.  But eighty is short.  Ten, or twenty, in the prime is even shorter.

What is the meaning of a person?  Meaning is all a matter of scope.  In my immediate social circle I may have some meaning, because I have some impact on the ones around me, something that is that would not be if I had not been there.  But pushed out beyond that circle to a national or international realm, my change and my impact are lost.  And so also in the scale of time, past one hundred years where I may still have some effect on to a scale of a thousand or ten thousand.  If I become a political leader or a military commander or a writer who affects the world visibly and greatly past my death, what then does that mean?  The scope may have been increased, but it is still nothing, for beyond the world to the solar system and that on one arm of one galaxy in a cluster of galaxies in a countless myriad of clusters, which acts in time-frames not of thousands or tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions of years, and more still.  Push the scope of meaning out far enough and even the greatest any person could ever aspire to be is no more significant than the reflection of a dust mote in the eye of a flea.

The religious person may be forgiven if at first blush it seems to him that God solves this problem of his meaning.  But this is only an illusion.  For regardless of how personal his God is, the believer is still a speck among the billions of souls damned to hell or blessed to heaven.  There was a time when she was not, and her impact is still nothing: push the matter out from herself and the few souls she knows to the many and then to the incomprehensibly infinite God, and we see very clearly that the matter of eternity has not been changed one iota through her.

But the call to existence is irrevocable.  I can no more undo my own creation than make two and two equal to seventeen.  And to attempt it is to despise the call and the existence.

What is there for me in a universe whose physical and temporal size dwarfs me to nothing, or where I find myself, constituted as I am, neither heavy nor light, and have no say in the matter?  I can no more change any of this than I can become God.  I can no more make my existence less fleeting, less a breath, than I can undo the Big Bang.  I must do what I can with what I have, and be the best that I can be.  One of the most wondrous things about sentience (to me) is not the capacity to ponder one’s own existence – that just leads to existentialism (the end of all philosophy, as nothingness is the end of any system too near a black hole) and, excepting cases of extraordinary courage, it leads to despair.  But rather the greatest thing is the capacity to choose.  I can choose whether to serve the poor or not, whether to attempt to increase the amount of good in the human experience in general and that of the people around me in particular, or whether to increase the amount of bad – be it because I don’t like them, or they believe something different than me, or they vote Republican, or whatever it may be.  This mystery of choice is the heart of all morality.  It is not sad that my life is (inevitably) meaningless in the scope of the universe – there is nothing that can be done about that – but the real tragedy is if my life is meaningless in every scope other than my own.  If the meaning is there in the scope of my friends, of those close to me, then it is beautiful.  And it can be a terrible beauty, like a well-evolved virus or parasite, if I make it a terrible life and destroy the meaning and happiness of others; and it can be a glorious beauty if I increase the meaning and happiness of others.  I cannot say that I am particularly exhilarated by the thought of snuffing out like the flame on a candle after eighty years.  I am not.  Nor am I convinced that there is any God watching over this to appreciate the art of my life (for whatever skill or beauty I can imbue it with), or who will extend it in an afterlife.  But this is what I have, and I aim to do well by it, both for myself and those around me.

You win a sinus infection!

Yup, so I was out almost all last week from my now-three-week-old job due to sickness. It’s great fun, especially when you’ve just started a new job and are trying to get your bearings and are finally getting what looks like a real project. Oh wait, it’s not fun at all, especially at such an inconvenient time. I’m fairly certain in my own mind that I got whatever head cold lead to this mess at yoga master’s birthday party (don’t ask – just don’t); someone must’ve coughed on the cheese and crackers, I’m sure of it. And I would’ve had a sore throat and that would’ve been that if I didn’t have allergies and the years-long developed capacity to get a sinus infection at the drop of a hat.

But I do and I did. I got antibiotics a few days ago and am no longer sleeping sixteen hours a day and feeling awful for the remaining eight. I’m virtually back to normal at this point. Yay for modern medicine!

During all this mess I also got to move out of temporary housing and into more permanent living arrangement. But how permanent is an apartment anyways? That was a nightmare unto itself; the movers (who had all my stuff in storage after shipping from Texas) couldn’t get a hold of me, and then changed my scheduled time, and then the apartment complex wasn’t ready for them so early; oh, it was a long convoluted mess and I was occasionally trying to hack up a lung during it all, popping cough drops and sudafed like they were candy.

Not that I’m actually completely moved in yet; I still have a few items to transfer out of my temp housing and am doing that tomorrow. Really, I just want to forget that this entire past week happened. Kind of like seasons 2 and 3 of Heroes.

The bad thing about moving out is that I’ll miss waking up to a view of the Olympic Peninsula.  Seriously, check it out:

But my new apartment has pretty nice views too, and I’m looking forward to it. I need to start furnishing it gradually – a sofa or loveseat, some sort of breakfast table (it’ll have to be small), I may need to get rid of my current desk and get a smaller one, and apparently I need to get a “grown-up bed” at some point (seriously, what’s wrong with a twin?), et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Now, to move on with that life thing.

I finished with school this past semester, in December, a semester short of the four-year norm. In short order, I will be going up to my beloved city of Seattle to start work in the post-college world. So, what have I learned over the past semester; and from what I know about my own past, what can I know about my future?

I didn’t share this with very many people, but since the past summer I’ve been on a dating ‘freeze.’ I dated very casually (and very briefly) about ten months ago – and nothing since that. My reason was this: I needed to figure out myself and my beliefs a bit more before getting into a relationship with someone else. Otherwise, it would be grossly unfair to him. This is not so much, as my roommate criticized me for, ‘waiting to figure out the mysteries of the universe before dating,’ but rather waiting to figure out what I am comfortable with concerning the mysteries of the universe before dating. Well, maybe he was right, but only by a little bit. In any case, as a result of the past semester I’ve tentatively lifted the ban on dating. Not that I think I’ll find anyone quick: a combination of my moral and religious views makes it virtually certain that there won’t be a very long waiting list.

I don’t think I’ve solved the mysteries of the universe. I’ve ruled out several answers and several bad heuristics to solving them. I’ve discovered what my own priorities are – I am, for example, much more dedicated to truth than to my own comfort, which is an easy and trite thing to say until the truth hurts you like a knife (but that’s when it stops being trite). I’ve also learned a great deal about psychological conditioning – the hard way. The good news is that as I’ve begun to sort all this out, and become more comfortable with sorting all this out, I’ve noticed significant – though gradual – improvements to my overall health (all stress-related issues). And even though I haven’t figured out ‘the mysteries of the universe,’ I think I’ve learned a lot about the process of figuring them out, and what is and is not reasonable, and the gulf between what is reasonable and what is possible. What a wide gulf it is. The details, I suppose, my close friends know.

I’m rather startled how arrogant some believers are (Albert Mohler, or even your typical evangelical), and astonishingly even some nonbelievers (hello, Richard Dawkins). Dawkins, if you’re unfamiliar with him, is a nonbeliever and damned proud of it you ignorant swine! I’m quite happy to let pride and certainty be the territory of the flagrantly religious (not that all religious people necessarily are prideful), and wouldn’t it be nice if instead humility and openness were elevated among the irreligious? Dawkins and his ilk don’t much help with that.

A lot of atheists have given atheists a bad rap. There are some atheists who say ‘There is no god or gods’ and others who say ‘There is no reason to believe in any known human system of god or gods.’ There is a world of difference – and hubris – between statements one and two. One is stating something that can never be actually proven and is therefore unreasonable; two is stating something that can be substantiated with good reasons, and is therefore reasonable. I actually have a half-baked ‘proof’ for the intractability of position one over two in my head. If it ever gets fully baked, I’ll post it. For the reasonable form of atheist, I’d suggest someone like Guy P. Harrison over against someone like Dawkins.

Similarly, a lot of Christians have given Christianity a bad rap. There are Christians who pretend that the (unobserved, unobservable) metaphysical realm is ‘obvious’ and the literary mess of the Bible is ‘clear.’ The interesting thing to me is that those who promote a ‘clear’ way of reading the Bible are generally the furthest away from the beliefs of the early Christians. They believe in things like penal substitutionary atonement and a tortured eschatology that includes the fabrication of the Rapture. I could even go on about original sin, which I can find no trace of in the New Testament, nor in the early church until Augustine invented it. As an alternative to some of the religious crazies (and, like the irreligious, no religious person is perfect), I’d suggest James Alison (my respect for whom has only grown) or even the blogger ‘Poser or Prophet’, or better yet a short list of personal acquaintances – I know, I need more literary points of reference here.

The rest of my life is not all that interesting – although one or another thing may have been exciting to me. I have been weightlifting with a vengeance. I did not meet my goal of putting on 20 lbs by the start of January. Rather, I had to settle for 13 lbs, but that is still much more than I’ve managed in the past. I’m pretty excited about it! I’m trying to figure out what my next goal should be, as I want to push a little beyond what I’ve been able to achieve so far – I just haven’t set a time-table because I’m in that uncertain time in-between college and post-college, and continuous access to a gym is a bit hard to have when you’re trying to live in two places at once, all while getting ready for the next big thing. But step one is to bulk up, and then somewhere around step four or five is summit Mount Rainier. Then step seven or so is hike Annapurna. I’ve realized that one big life goal of mine is to become some sort of cross between Bear Grylls and Ansel Adams: I don’t want to eat all the gross stuff Bear does, but I want to get off-trail more than Adams. But you will know when I am nearing perfection, because I will look more and more like Bear Grylls and my pictures will look more and more like Ansel Adams’s.

I have thought about this blog and what I want it to be. I have some writings I still want to put up – but more prose and story than out-and-out philosophy, as it’s such a pleasanter and more engaging read. The upside of moving to Seattle is all the hiking (and I am extremely happy about this), and there certainly will be lots of pictures. I have been eying a new camera and will almost immediately in the spring start looking at what gear additions I will need. But it’s come to my attention that when writing for this blog, there are three people I typically think of – one of whom I text my entire life to on an almost daily basis (and who I had the good pleasure of recently spending the weekend with); one of whom I don’t think really reads this (probably because he has a life), but I’ll be co-habiting the Emerald City with him; and one of whom I have managed to make myself a terribly infrequent pen-pal to (I promise to resume when I have an address again). All of these people (along with other friends who are not blog readers) I talk to and share a whole hell of a lot more heart with than I would ever put up here. So what is this place, if not for those pieces that I like and would like to share beyond a circle of good friends, and for photography? So I’d expect more of that, along with the typical infrequency, going forward.

Peace out, folks.

I have developed non-insignificant RSI in my right hand. As a result, the blog is on indefinite hiatus. Also, my thoughts and analysis of Coldplay’s new album are indefinitely (permanently?) postponed. Yes – that is what I was ruminating on. (I don’t know if Adam reads this but if he does I can see him shaking his head in disgust now.) But it is a good album, and it speaks from beginning to end about war and human-perpetrated evil. And I enjoyed it thank-you-very-much and it made me think about these things (though how much does that take?).

On the up side, this frees me up from many distractions toward working on my Five Goals for the semester, of which two time-consuming ones are reading (and reading and reading) theology/philosophy, and finishing a research project I started in Greek (which I have not yet re-started). Of the remaining Goals, none involve much if any computer time, so that is good. Same goes for classes – no really heavy programming.

So until we meet again. Those of you I know who have my number, that is always best. Those of you who are here, let’s go get coffee sometime soon. Or perhaps I can coerce you, unlike almost all my other friends, into kayaking out on the ‘lake’?

Ciao

PS:  Comments are working again.  I had inadvertently checked a wrong box in the admin panel.  And I was wondering why the comments had stopped all of the sudden!  Thanks to Joseph for pointing this out to me.