Two Thousand and Ten

It’s strange to be blogging in 2010…that could also be due to the fact that I haven’t blogged in over a month.

To my devoted readers: I am truly sorry.  I get this way sometimes with blogs, but I am going to fight to regain motivation.

For Christmas break (its weird saying that because I am no longer in school, but I still got 2.5 weeks of vacation from work), I went to Austin, TX, to see family as well as Phoenix, AZ, to see one of my best friends.  It was my first time in AZ so it was definitely an experience.  Phoenix is a really spread out city.  I liked it a lot because it had all of the elements of the cities I love.  It had the suburban area, a nice, kinda quaint downtown area with seemingly a lot to do, a couple museums (one of which is the soon to open Museum of Musical Instruments), two pro sports teams, a seemingly nice range of independent stores, and great warm weather all year round.  My friend took this while we were on South Mountain, one of the mountains outside of Phoenix.  Its a pretty amazing view of the whole city of Phoenix.

Pretty amazing shot

Another amazing part of my break was the UNC vs UT basketball game in the new Dallas Cowboy stadium (aka the game of my life).  I am both a huge UT fan as well as a huge UNC fan.  My UNC friends all ridicule me for this forbidden love of two teams, but I embrace it.  Its like having two kids of different ages.  I have been a UT fan since birth and it was my first love, then came UNC, my beloved alma mater.  I can’t love one more than the other.  They are both very special to me.  It was a great game and Texas won, but either way I would have come out smiling.  I cheered for both teams and the people around me thought I was conflicted but after I explained my story, they understood.  The stadium is monstrous.  I have to just show you the pictures cause its unbelievable.

I was still pretty far away at this point and it still looks huge

this place was huge

I proudly wore BOTH colors

the screen was bigger than the floor!

New Years Eve was not as much fun as I wanted it to be but it was my fault.  I was flying back on a red eye on the 31st at 11:45pm and not getting to Raleigh til 10:30am on the 1st.  It was a cheap ticket and I wasn’t thinking.  I never want to do that again.

I am not much of a resolution maker anymore because, like everyone else, they never actually play out like I plan them.  I never am consistent with working out, I always fall short of reading my Bible everyday, and those are just the ones that I try every year.  I recently read a blog by John Piper that was entitled, “10 Resolutions for Mental Health.”  They weren’t the typical resolutions that fall to the way-side after 2-3 months.  These are things that are easier as well as less stressful, but still require a conscious effort to do them.

10 Resolutions for Mental Health

1. At least once every day I shall look steadily up at the sky and remember that I, a consciousness with a conscience, am on a planet traveling in space with wonderfully mysterious things above and about me.

2. Instead of the accustomed idea of a mindless and endless evolutionary change to which we can neither add nor subtract, I shall suppose the universe guided by an Intelligencewhich, as Aristotle said of Greek drama, requires a beginning, a middle, and an end.

I think this will save me from the cynicism expressed by Bertrand Russell before his death when he said: “There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment, and then nothing.”

3. I shall not fall into the falsehood that this day, or any day, is merely another ambiguous and plodding twenty-four hours, but rather a unique event, filled, if I so wish, with worthy potentialities.

I shall not be fool enough to suppose that trouble and pain are wholly evil parentheses in my existence, but just as likely ladders to be climbed toward moral and spiritual manhood.

4. I shall not turn my life into a thin, straight line which prefers abstractions to reality. I shall know what I am doing when I abstract, which of course I shall often have to do.

5. I shall not demean my own uniqueness by envy of others. I shall stop boring into myself to discover what psychological or social categories I might belong to. Mostly I shall simply forget about myself and do my work.

6. I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what Lewis calls their “divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic” existence.

7. I shall sometimes look back at the freshness of vision I had in childhood and try, at least for a little while, to be, in the words of Lewis Carroll, the “child of the pure unclouded brow, and dreaming eyes of wonder.”

8. I shall follow Darwin’s advice and turn frequently to imaginative things such as good literature and good music, preferably, as Lewis suggests, an old book and timeless music.

9. I shall not allow the devilish onrush of this century to usurp all my energies but will instead, as Charles Williams suggested, “fulfill the moment as the moment.” I shall try to live well just now because the only time that exists is now.

10. Even if I turn out to be wrong, I shall bet my life on the assumption that this world is not idiotic, neither run by an absentee landlord, but that today, this very day, some stroke is being added to the cosmic canvas that in due course I shall understand with joy as a stroke made by the architect who calls himself Alpha and Omega.