Christmas?

So let me do a little recap of xmas articles I've seen in the last few days:

1) Santa-on-a-cross

2) We wish you a minimalist Christmas

3) No use for Yule

Gotta say, overall I'm pretty happy.

In Tim news, in the midst of a discussion with my mom about why exactly I had spent 544.5$ on a Playstation 3 after I had failed two of my classes in part due to video games (not quite like it sounds, but definitely just as awkward/defensive) somehow we got to talking about what I was like as a child which yielded this story:

When I was about 4, because we were still living in Seattle my mom was telling me the story of the Israelites' Exodus from Egypt, specifically the bit about the Red Sea. I can remember thinking that it was all well and good that it was opened up for them or whatever. But then, apparently, she told me the part about God closing the sea on Pharoah's army. I guess I looked up at her and said, in all seriousness, "That naughty, naughty God".

Substitution

I've felt a lot of lonliness this semester, maybe this college career. It has resulted (predictably) in reflection on lonliness.


I love how angsty this gets.

There is this paradox. People have spoken of feeling alone when they are surrounded by people, at a party or workplace por ejemplo. And this experience is certainly not foreign to me. I think that feeling can be named 'alone'. What I've been experiencing is almost the exact opposite. When I'm completely alone, when walk up the stairs, returning to a cold room with not even the traces of company, it's in those moments that I become aware of this closeness to someone. When no one is around, that is when I believe, when it's true, when I feel more tangibly than anything the presence of someone I love. My imagination plays a role, of course. That's probably why this person is most often a woman. Which sheds light on another interesting side: waiting. Because after I've settled in my room and it's clear no one is actually here, I usually engage in this sort of active waiting, or preparation. I do work, mostly. But it is always this attitude that this whoever could come walking in at any moment. And there's two layers to it: the first is the obviously longterm one, that this presence I feel or expect to feel is just the deepseated desire for one other human being that, in the word's of a friend, I would "do passionately and often". And no mom, that most certainly would not be the extent of the relationship (but if I have anything to say about it, it'd be a factor for darn certain). The second kind of waiting is that although I'd be far from bored or disengaged, when that person arrived, you could bet cash money just about everything except for them would be the farthest thing from my mind. That's the second kind of waiting.



Of course, there is no physical presence. I mean that's the whole point of this message.

In place of sharing kisses and conversation with my lover, I heave a sigh to my God. And it feels good.

Rent-a-Rower: Uncommon Projects

Last weekend, I got to ride in an elevator just shy of 100 years old, built in 1908. It's the oldest elevator in Tacoma. At that time I was helping a church move their organ out of storage. So we moved all of those pieces, saw cotton/canvas insulated wired that powers the bellows and stops from the console. It took about 5 hours. The organ is going to take about a year and a half to construct, apparently.

3 months = 1 Sentence

My thoughts are like clounds: big, beautiful, and complex but more than anything, fleeting.

SEX

This post was originally removed. I've put it back in for various reasons, but mostly because the main reason I removed it was that I was told most girls who read this would be totally scared away from me. OK, fine. Well, then they ought to be scared because with it's on the outside or the inside, this is a part of me or at least part of my history.

So here it is:

There is a lot of sexual relief in homosexuality for me.

I'm terrible aware that I desire orgasm, especially shared orgasm.

But even more so in a child-like, confused way, I am aware that if my pink intersects with a female pink, I will drown in pleasure and we will fuse together. My mind tells me that if my heart is pure, the best (but not necessarily) result would be conception and a child.

While I just described a joyful event, for many people very much including myself, the reality is terrifying, implying some darkness, a crazy spiral.

I don't know what to do. I mean really, thanks whomever. Here I am, almost 21 and utterly frustrated. Where are the boundaries? NO ONE has ever told me what sex is. Everyone in my life has parted with advice about general lifestyle, beautiful wisdom like a flower parts with its petals. Not so with sex. It's scary.


I have been taught and there are inconceivably elegant books written about some of the most intimate details of something as majestic as the universe. I can express in staggeringly accurate terms some fundamentals of launching a mass into orbit 270 km above the earths surface. I know what some stars are made of. Heck, I just found out that the sun rotates about every month. Whats more, the area at the equator rotates faster than the poles. That is fundamental and extremely mysterious, but we drink in details.

Well I have the same thirst about sex. Surprise. And ya know, the best part is, I probably wouldn't be making such a big deal about it if so many people weren't so afraid of it. Funny right? When a lot of people get scared of something, no one talks about it and when someone does, everyone else gets more scared. Oh wait, am I a Christian? Is one of God's most oft repeated commandants (granted "born again's" it is in that nasty Old Testament) "Do not be afraid".

I mean, chuck theology out the window. Actually bring it back in, I want to make a quick comparison. So the way we have things set up is this: Philo-sophy and Theo-logy, that is the love of wisdom and the study of God. Granted, both of those are positive things. But, even though wisdom is portrayed as a person (a woman more specifically, but I won't get into that) God is actually something personal. I mean, going back to chucking theology out the window, if God is a spiritual or super spiritual being or some psychological construct, people find personal relief in the divine. WISDOM ISN'T PERSONAL, SO WHY WOULD WE LOVE IT AND STUDY THAT WHICH IS PERSONAL? Anyway, disregarding most of the nature of God, any divine being that commands/asks us not to fear has got something going on. I mean if anything asks anyone not to act out of fear, its a pretty safe bet that they are trustworthy.

So I dunno, right? I'm a little confused. Maybe we should be afraid of a person that didn't have a physical penis and now does have one. Like they are a threat. To us. Like we should fear them. Like Jesus tells us to.

I mean, if we're going to talk about changing our bodies, I would much rather sit on my soon-to-be-obese ass, using my imminently-atrophied muscles to change channels on a television, watching a majority of programming designed to lie to me just enough to spend my money on shit I've never need and would probably just contribute to my decline than get a vagina where I didn't have one before. Much better to be out of shape than to get a sex change right?

I'd apologize if I hadn't thought about this so much or wasn't so darn pissed off. Actually, more than anything, I might as well just claim responsibility for my own sexual ignorance and frustration right? Can't blame anyone but myself for a personal lack of exploration.

This is the message that had been in the place of this message.

"So I removed this because my mom asked me to and I respect her.

She said that it "reflected sex as an experience and not an expression". I agree with her that sex is not just something to do, that it is a piece of a healthy relationship.

If you want to read the original post, as it is a valid record of my thoughts and feelings at one point in time, feel free to email me at timjpost@gmail.com.

I may be re-posting it again, after I have re-read/modified the post, or maybe after I actually have sex. No guarnatees."

Three Homes

I am realizing that I'm growing up. Someway. I understand that I need to put effort into it, that I have to be some sort of self-propelling being. In any action, if it is traced far enough back, it ends at my self motivation.

Thats all I have to say about growing up except that sometimes I do propel myself and sometimes I don't. This is a difficult existence. I need God in me.

I had that thought as I considered my 3 homes and two families. I intended to write this back in August, so now it is more like I have one home for each family. Even so, the time and care I invested in the house I lived at made it a home certainly and I cared about it.

It is strange having three homes. I think mostly, we either have one home or everywhere and anywhere is a home. And I find so much in each one, I certainly don't need all of them, I find overlapping advantages everywhere. But each of them has or had their own certain trait, a mood or even just a level of order or purpose.

Very much, it makes me want to build my own, to be responsible and a master. Heck I'd like to simply be responsible.

Among Giants

The trip in the Olympics was amazing. That is simply it, I was found, in reality, in certain moments, I was found completely.

The time that stands out particularly in my mind, I actually got in trouble for. I had gone off by myself exploring just a little ways and I found a grove of trees up on a very small ridge, overlooking what was probably a pretty large valley. It was so cloudy I couldn't tell. I pushed through some of the very short pines, the seemed to be old men and women that moved very slowly, so slowly. I joined them, and found a spot to sit down. I could see out into the cloud. I could look down the ridge wall and see trees and rocks sticking out. It was like there was a clear bubble about 50 ft in diameter about me and then everything just disappeared into fog.

A few days before I had left, I saw a movie called The Fountain. It is beautiful, to say the absolute least. In one story, a monk carefully removes and eats the bark of a tree he loves and is trying to save. It was intimate. There are not combinations of words that come to mind that could possibly relate how incredible that relationship was, between that tree and that person. I had been looking the entire trip for a place to meditate, and I found it right there. The clouds were moving in front of me and I had reclined into the branches of a few trees. They formed a spingy, supportive cushion for my back and I just opened. I noticed how tight I had become, having to walk with hurting feet and only enough food for a couple days and enjoy it. I was still soft, but I was becoming carved. I asked the trees for them. I sat and sat and thought about God and death and life. I tried to understand the absolutely incredible amount of rocks that I had walked over or seen. Have you noticed? There are a lot of rocks in this world. Why?

I opened my eyes and slowly took the bark off of one of the trees, a small piece, about the thickness of bark and as long as my thumb. I put it in my mouth and chewed it and swallowed it. It was a symbol, a communion. It felt like the tree I took it from was female. But in retrospect, that is what I had/have/was taught to look for. Alone, with nothing but my father and brothers and rocks (which are good things to have, for sure). But maybe I thought I would be "wrong" if I wasn't desperate for some form of motherhood or a mate. Just a thought. Anyway, I felt much more a part of the environment, something certainly separate from these things, as I had human produced chemicals in my body and my clothes were made mostly out of plastics. Heck, even the fact that I had clothes mostly made me separate from my environment. But I felt like a citizen of this Earth. I still do.

I realized on that trip that the human experience is a travel of potential differences. For days we were up in the mountains, among peaks and ridges. For other days, we were down in the lowlands, hiking on trails through woodland. While I was up in the mountains I imagined those who had gone before me. I imagined them as ghosts, or legends, always walking in the snow, always sharing communion with the things around them. But eventually, occasionally they came down. The ones I imagined as the friendliest would take sojourns into the mountains for rejuvenation, but one cannot be rejuvenated forever, by the same thing. It doesn't make sense. I realized that my time here, in school, and my time in the mountains and the time I will hopefully be spending in the plains of America and God only knows where else are all life. They are all existence and they are perpetually changing. I am full, I feel good. I am hungry, I eat, it tastes good. I am weak, I exercise to become strong. I am lazy, I push my self to work hard. I work hard, I exercise, I rest. These are all good changes.

I learned what my dad meant when he said so long ago, in reference to school work, "Sometimes you just have to keep on hiking. It may be a quick, gratifying experience to glissade down a snowfield just off of the trail but ultimately you will have to climb back up and out there, you have to get yourself to your campsite." We had to make it places by nightfall. It got cold and dark, and usually it stayed that way, except for the brief flash of dinner. The second to last day, we had to go 16 miles and there was simply no way faster (perhaps no way at all) except to hike it. That was a very telling feeling. It was a tangible accomplishment. I sung a song.

Another distinct memory I had was just after lunch on that second to last day. We were walking across one of many bridges that spanned these creeks that had cut very steep, intense gullies into the ridge. At the middle of many of these bridges, looking down the gully, 100 ft away it was about 90-120 feet lower. The bridges themselves were usually about 40 feet long and maybe 50-60 feet high. As we walked across this particular bridge, I noticed a tree on the opposit side. Part of its trunk was growing straight out of a rock, before it twisted and the rest of the tree started growing towards the sky. It was like something people don't believe in nowadays, and those sorts of things were all around. Huge stumps, either dry rotten or charred by lightening. The place we camped was a huge bar on the Quinault River, called Wolf Bar (thats how I know it is a bar :D ). There was one main trail that wound through this amazing grove of pine trees, covered in moss and all about 10 feet apart. It was not thick forest. Beyond it, a beach of smooth rocks of all different sizes and sand stretched out ~150 ft to the river. A wind/breeze was constantly blowing down the river (I know because I tried for about 45 min to take a nap on a sandy patch. I got rest but I certainly didn't fall asleep). On the other side of the river, thick pine trees came right down to the bank. Again, our grove and the forest on the opposite side were both delightful, but also the contrast between the two.

It was much warmer, closer to the Earth.

The clarity I gained from that trip was exquisite. It was complemented or enabled by the fact that I didn't have internet (or a decent computer) at my home over the summer. A definite plus.

I have many stories. When I came back, I saw friends, and we talked about trips they had taken and it surprised me how many of my memories had to be "woken up" by their stories and that mostly, I could individually remember only one or twos stories from my 50 miler and Philmont. Of course, I actually thought about many of my trips and recalled more, but it is a little strange that I didn't really value those experiences or something. Honestly, (and if I have kids, they can quote me on this) I think it was so much virtual media, anything from computer games to music on demand to books to televisions. I mean, especially video games. Especially video games. There is just no substitute for real, confident thirsty experience. In the words of Richard Feynman "I have to understand the world, you see." This understanding is possible. You must see and think. You must get wrong answers and take ridiculous risks. Because really all we have is wrong answers, it just happens that some are less wrong and more useful than others. And thank God.

So anyway. There is nothing that cannot be done. There are a lot of derivatives (such as Solomon's "there is nothing that hasn't already been done." which I think is true). There are also a lot of qualifiers such as "you must possess an active uterus to have a child after having sexual intercourse with person with a penis". But those are trivial, almost backwards. It's the wrong way to think about things.

That is what I learned, is that we exist and we have life and it is directed and we have to do things, it just takes time.