neglect

Sorry I've been off the blog for a while. Not that you're hanging on my every word or anything, but I have neglected my little patch of cyberspace. My life has officially gotten crazier than it has ever been before, with my job demanding - and getting - more of me than I thought any job I had ever would. At one point last week I actually wondered if I could crawl under my desk for a quick cry and get away with it. I went out with the chick posse for Thai food after work instead. See how capable and able to cope I am!

It's finally starting to feel like summer is coming. Today is Memorial Day, the first bank holiday of the year that people actually barbecue. Kind of a bizarre way to honor the wartime fallen, now that I think about it. But anyway, we're supposed to get our first heat wave this week with some 90º(30ºc) days ahead. I have had an awesome three-day weekend of naps, TV and happy hour (twice) with friends. I desperately needed the whole three days to decompress from recent insanity at work. It should get better this week. Here's hoping.

I think another reason I haven't really been blogging much lately is that I've been processing some tough stuff and didn't want to blog because I knew I'd talk about it, and I wasn't quite ready to do that. It's been hard this year because the door has closed (for now) on my moving to Edinburgh and I've had to look at yet another dream slip through my fingers. It's happened so many times in my life, and I thought I'd finally moved past it, only to find myself in this place again.

The disappointment was nearly crippling for a while there, more than I was willing to talk about or blog about. I've had some pretty intense conversations with God, the tone of which I've never had with Him before, asking Him things like why He would put those dreams in my heart if He was just going to waive them in front of me like a carrot on a string and not let me have them. And of course it has become about much more than just that one thing, it has become the time that God and I are working through the pain and disappointment from all the things I knew I should've had in my life that I haven't or don't, going right back to even the early years of my life. I know, in spite of my disappointment, that God put the dreams in my heart for a reason, He loves me and His timing is best, but it's still sometimes hard to believe these things will ever come to be. I feel like this is the process of letting God be everything to me, and letting Him mean more to me than my dreams.

So I don't know what is next for me, and frankly I'm a bit unwilling to make any sort of plan. For now I'm just working hard at my job, trying to save some money, staying involved in my community and staying current with the people in my life. That's all I can manage right now. Any other planning in my life for a while will consist only of where I'll go on my next vacation. When it's time I know the doors will open with out my forcing it.

So there it is, now you know what's up with me and I can blog honestly again.

Conchords

I have a new favorite band. They're called Flight of the Conchords. Check out this song about Albi the racist dragon...

dissent

A few days ago I was in the break room at work and someone was talking about the May Day March that took place in various cities around the country on Tuesday. Portland, protest capital, of course joined in again. I think this is the 4th or 5th year, but I don't remember for sure.

The first year it was a huge blowup and a bunch of anarchist wannabes infiltrated and the police swat team had to spend the whole night rounding up rioters and getting them off the freeways that ring downtown. I was working at a Starbucks downtown at the time, and my store happened to be around the corner from the precinct office that is headquarters for the swat team and traffic patrol. It was intense as they came through in waves that night and talked about the things they were encountering. Maybe it was hearing them that night, and watching on the news how much worse it got later, that turned me into a "protest hater", as I mentioned in a recent post about politics.

Anyway, someone was talking about it and I said that I hate protest, that they're a waste of public funds, don't change anything and pull the wacko trouble makers out of the woodwork. The person I was talking to is someone who thinks that all civil authority is evil, and that reaction to "The Man" (he calls it that...even though he's white!) is the only way to change. He thinks that all things conservative are evil and that Christians are the root of that evil. (I'm not making it up - just paraphrasing things he's said himself.)

When I said I hated protests he asked me, "what about the civil rights marches in the 60's? Do you really think those didn't change anything?", which stumped me, because that's the first place I'd go if I had a time machine and could go back and participate in history. I told him that was different, and even though I couldn't put my finger on why, I just knew it wasn't the same. And, of course, my entire walk home I was thinking, "Am I just a hypocrite about this one, or is the Portland's protest propensity really different than what went on in the civil rights movement?" I decided that I wasn't a hypocrite, and that it came down to the difference between a demonstration and a protest. So I looked them up on Wikipedia, which said...

Demonstration:
A demonstration is the public display of the common opinion of an activist group, often economically, political, or socially, by gathering in a crowd, usually at a symbolic place or date, associated with that opinion. The purpose of a demonstration is to show that a significant amount of people are for or against a certain issue, person, law, etc.

Protest:
Protest expresses relatively overt reaction to events or situations: sometimes in favour, more often opposed. Protesters may organize a protest as a way of publicly and forcefully making their opinions heard in an attempt to influence public opinion or government policy, or may undertake direct action to attempt to directly enact desired changes themselves.

So it seems that a demonstration is a show of a common opinion, where a protest is a corporate vocalization/enactment of rebellion. The word demonstrate indicates showing, where the word protest indicates dissent, and in the definition above is a reaction.

Can I just admit...at the very word "reaction" in this context something stubborn rises up in me. I don't even have words to express how disgusting I find it. So many votes are cast in this fair city out of reaction, trying to get someone or something changed simply for the sake of change, but with no thought that the change they propose could just possibly make things worse in the end.

I say go ahead and demonstrate. Show the common opinion, but do it with your brain, not with reaction. Write to your congressperson. Join your neighborhood association or become a precinct committeeperson. Read up on both sides of an issue or situation, and don't just take the media or public opinion's word for it -whatever direction you lean politically. Then don't react; think, decide then respond in obedience to your concience.