St. Oliver

I was on my Sunday morning train ride, skulking home from a Saturday night not spent at home with tousled hair and the feeling that everyone knew I was in the same clothes I was dancing in the night before. People were dressed well for a Sunday morning train ride. The people behind me talking about the way God led them to Moody Bible Institute. The people in front of me were carrying bibles. Everyone was going to church. I used to do that, I think. It seems foreign to me now. I didn't feel any of the guilt I always imagined the people in my shoes feeling when the roles were reversed. The only thing that ran through my mind was how I lived with a girl once who claimed that her beagle, Oliver, carried books for blind students at the Moody Bible Institute. The truth was much uglier. Oliver subsisted on a steady diet of Christian children.

Shane and Carmen

The Penalty

There should be a name for that phenomenon that happens when you have heard a song many times and then one morning on the way to work, you hear it and it is like you're hearing it for the first time. This song was that song for me this week.

Farmer Vicky

The CSA season is almost over. Our farmer sends out an email every week telling us what we will be getting in our boxes and updating us on what's happening with the farm. I love her updates. This was the beginning of this weeks email:

I am back from my trip and in full gear. I had a great time. The mountains were beautiful - and cold. I was actually deterred one day by a snow storm. What impressed me most was the golden hues in the aspens. I thought of harvest time. The earth turns the most fabulous colors as if to rejoice in the time of harvest. I get excited watching it all come in, and it seems Mother Nature, joins with me in the triumph of the season. As a farmer, it is my job to be harmony with nature, working within the confines of natural selection, and designation. What nature creates day to day and month to month I seek to cooperate with and utilize my skills to produce a crop that only Mother Nature can create. I can not create, only emulate. It is so important to realize we are truly not the head, the boss, the top of the heap - we are subordinates in the overall scheme of nature, and this world we so wonderfully inhabit.

Travels with my Aunt

I picked this book up when I while I was back in Chattanooga last month. I wanted to read something by Graham Green and I can't seem to get enough travel lately, so this book seemed perfect.

I have not quite finished it but feel ready to share some of my favorite passages. The synopsis:

Henry Pulling, a retired bank manager, meets his septuagenarian Aunt Augusta for the first time in over fifty years at what he supposes to be his mother's funeral. Soon after, she persuades Henry to abandon his dahlias and travel her way, Brighton, Paris, Istanbul, Paraguay...through Aunt Augusta Henry joins a shiftless, twilight society; mixing with hippies, war criminals, CIA men; smoking pot, breaking all currency regulations...coming alive after a dull suburban lifetime.

I love Aunt Augusta's character. Everyone should have a relative like her. Wildly independent, quirky, adventurous. She speaks so matter-of-factly about things that should be shocking from a 70yr old woman that you are convinced that hers is the only way to live.

When speaking of one of her many old lovers, she says "I have always preferred an occasional orgy to a nightly routine".

Another passage I liked:

Aunt Augusta: "You will be sorry one day that you refused to let me tell you the story I proposed"

"What story", I asked, thinking of my father.

"The story of Charles Pottifer, of course", my aunt said.

"Another time, Aunt Augusta."

"You are wrong to be so confident in the existence of another time," my aunt replied and called for the bill so loudly that the dog barked back at her from the bar.

Goodbye, Amanda

Today is my coworker, Amanda's last day at work. Don't be fooled. This blog is only tangentially about Amanda. It is about me and my constant inability to be satisfied with where I am. Amanda is leaving to do an internship in Thailand so we bought her a Thailand travel guide. I was browsing through it during lunch getting lost in thought about traveling again. Not like weekend traveling, but quit-your-job-sell-your-things traveling.

My plan: Continue working until sometime this winter when I will quit my job, sublet my apartment and head south of the border. Then I will bunker down for grad school....somewhere.

I love this picture. Tropical downpours, sunburned legs, passion fruit green tea, and what appears to be a banana. I don't ask for much from life.

Mismatched Socks

This morning I put on a sock with a little black dot in the corner on the seam. I remembered how you used to mark your socks with a black dot so they wouldn't mingle with my socks. I also remembered how I intentionally disregarded your black dots and matched up dotted and non-dotted socks wearing them both haphazardly like I did most things; while you did most things meticulously. In fact, if you were reading this you would probably be wondering about my use of semicolon.