Its sort of true.

Mostly, I like the picture though. Great stuff at xkcd.com, go check it out.

From two weeks ago

I don't feel as bad anymore. I have decided to have a good attitude!

Art!

Highly strategically placed items, with a strong political message:

All in an Alaskan Day

I've been in places without internet, and the places with internet were slow. But today I'm in Juneau, the place of my birth, at my grandma's house. I have made a video for you all, aren't you excited! Its one of the more adventuresome days so far on this trip.

Enjoy the work of a genius, i mean, first-time filmmaker...

Just a few lines...

the mountains call to me
like a lover who snuck out in the night
to come and explore
their dark wild mysteries
to risk everything to be one with
their pure and dangerous beauty-
and I will not turn a deaf ear.

-6/17/07

I Lied

I guess it's a bi-weekly Top 10. Or something. Last weekend I was busy packing to travel to Washington to join my Dad on our boat out there. If you hadn't heard, we're spending the summer in Alaska, but first we have to cruise up the inside passage from Washington through Canada to Alaska! Yay! Photos on my Flickr.

And now for this week's top 10, hurrah...

Listen to all of them, because they're all great.

:)

dan

Brainwaves

Am I starting to form some definition out of the madness?

:)

Buttercups (For You)

Hope it brightens your day a bit!

Dan

Zuihitsu

Zuihitsu is an old Japanese writing form that refers to writing one's mind as thoughts come to it, perhaps best described in English as "miscellany" or "stream of thought" writing. I had to do one for English, and I rather liked it, so:

What of the mind, that it rots so quickly? Sitting here lazily, doing nothing and doing it well, I feel as though my brain has taken leave, journeyed to a far off land. Oh, sure, it calls to leave a message once in a while, but a state of disconnect still prevails. Why can’t one engage in a few idle hours and emerge unaffected? It would be only fair, considering the amount of bombardment it must take every day. Perhaps we have developed a regrettable dependency on the cruelly frenetic pace that we must keep up with. We’re going nowhere, and doing so in a hurry! Ah, but we’ve forgotten about the most important thing, the heart. Have our souls whole-heartedly jumped on this speeding bandwagon as well, or do they still long for the quiet moments? Mine, without a doubt, pines for the brakes of simplicity to be slammed upon, so I may take my time romping about the meadows of joy and peace, feeling nothing but the earth and grass between my toes, listening for the birds’ sweet warble, gazing upward to the sky that may someday be mine, along with all the happiness any man could desire.

:)

Songs of the Week

I think I am going to start a new thing on here. Every week I will list my top 10 songs from the previous week. Sounds sweet right?

I should just tell you now, every song on these lists will be highly recommended by me for you to check out/buy. We'll see, maybe I can even make something so you can play the songs. Wouldn't that be swift!

Right so, Ladies and Gentlemen, I now do presenteth ye the inaugural Dan's Weekly Top 10 Songs!

1. Dashboard Confessional - Carry This Picture (it just makes me happy, and I love the mind picture it creates!)
2. Modest Mouse - Little Motel (I've been getting way into Modest Mouse lately, they're excellent.)
3. Brand New - Handcuffs (when the strings come in later in the song it gives me chills...)
4. Bob Marley - No Woman No Cry (there is a definite and growing hippie streak in me.)
5. The Postal Service - The District Sleeps Alone Tonight (quite possibly the most beautiful song I have ever heard. In my top 5 overall as well.)
6. Brand New - Jesus Christ (the lyrics = amazing. this song never ceases to give me chills.)0
7. Sufjan Stevens - The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us! (beautiful...)
8. Bob Marley - Them Belly Full [But We Hungry] (more hippie-ness)
9. The Hush Sound - Wine Red
10. Frou Frou - Let Go

EDIT: NOW YOU CAN LISTEN!!!!

There you go. Listen to all of them! By the way, I strongly recommend the following sites for music discovery and such:

last.fm
projectplaylist.com

:)

Displace Me

Before you read this, go read this post from Peter about Displace Me in Washington, DC. That will give you a pretty good idea what Displace Me was all about, because mine is more about feelings and reflections.

I'm lazy and I don't want to type out the general facts, so:

Read the official press release!

Look at the pictures while/before/after you read this.

This thing was life-changing. I was able to experience true unity and acceptance, and get a taste of culture outside of the SDA/BMA/home bubble. Not that I really consider myself SDA anymore, (yes, many many changes since last story time, kids) but still. I have been and am going through a time of searching in pretty much all the areas of my life, and Displace Me was a direction, a cause, something unquestionably right and noble to me.

As beautiful as that part of it was, the best and amazing thing for me was the people I met and my interactions with them. Real people, and it didn't matter who was what and if they did this or that. First it was the guys who I played hackysack with during the filming section. Then there was our next door neighbors, a big group of city homies who asked me to play them a song as soon as I had grabbed Peter's guitar. I played some Jack Johnson and some random stuff of my own for a little while, and then one of them happened to ask if we liked Crowder, and of course Peter and I were so excited. So we sung a few Crowder's and more people started coming, culminating in 15-20 people during "You Are My Joy."

Then there was Yle, (?) the friendly Korean girl who came over and said she had heard the guitar and she wanted us to play her a song, a love song to be specific. Peter sang some sweet little thing and man everybody in the world should have seen the beaming smile on her face. So we got to talking to her and ended up chilling with her during the activities of the evening (for like an hour at least!) She was so completely accepting and beautifully happy. During the very moving 21 minutes of silence I laid on my back looking at the stars, Yle on my left and Peter on the right and it just felt like we were all three old friends, and there was definitely a friendship love flowing between all of us. Soon after that she left to be with her group and I didn't see her again the whole time, much to my disappointment. And I didn't even get a picture, stupid me...

After that was the crazy dance circle, the sweat and smiles of the drummers and dancers mixing with the heartfelt words of our chants and floating up like incense to God who we hope transferred that straight to the heart of good ol' BushyBush like a brick. Yeah.

By some miracle of energy, I played my best game ever hacking with some colorful college guys and girl... it was the first time since I started seriously hacking that I was able to play with people better/as good as me. Good stuff, and after taking long exposures of the monument and flags for a while and listening to Peter talk to the super-chill Aussie girl with super-long dreads about America and justice and all kinds of things, me and him went down to our little cardboard home and started playing guitar. This was like 1 o'clock or something.

We started by doing Stars (Crowder, not Switchyfooty or Coldplayerz) and it was so beautiful. It didn't matter that I played the wrong chords. This brought I think about 4 people over who started just worshiping with us. We did a bunch more Crowder and some Jars of Clay and then there were some girls who didn't know Crowder so I played some Jack Johnson and we did a bunch of original stuff. It was so cool to be playing Banana Pancakes and see a few people around in the shelters pop their heads over their walls and sing along with grins of blissful recognition. The aforementioned girls fell in love with the original stuff that we did, especially "Laid Back." They said we should record them and we agreed...

By 2:00 the group filtered down to me and Peter and a girl named... Shelly I think?... She was an upperclassman in college and a very level-headed Christian. We shared a lot of our doubts and struggles with her and her soft-spoken and mature friend Katie who came maybe 15 minutes later. The four of us just shared and bonded and talked about everything, but mostly God and the questions we all had, punctuated by occasional idiotic statements/jokes by me and Peter that made all of us laugh and them wonder at our eccentricity.

About 2:45 or 3:00 a girl who I forgot her name came over and asked us if we had any pot, and of course we didn't but we invited her to sit and talk with us. Shelly shared her blanket with the girl and we got to hear some of her story, how she lived in New York but came to the D.C. Displace Me so she could get "as close to kicking Bush's ass as possible" or something like that. She was a senior in high school and a really nice girl with a colorful vocabulary, but I didn't mind that at all.

You see, it didn't matter. Not in the least bit. None of our faults mattered, and the masks were thrown so far away. I was completely myself, stripped down to the raw me, and it was such freedom and joy. I was so close to those people I had never met before, closer than I had felt to my long-time friends back home in months. No worries about impressing anyone, nobody judging, nobody telling me to go to freaking bed, and although I wasn't really speaking to God, I can't deny he was there. What I felt there is God's character. I feel like Christians have grossly misinterpreted him and also applied way too many labels to him. But anyway thats a discussion for another night.

My lasting image from Displace Me, the one that's burned into me and I long to relive again and again, came after we left our little place to warm our hands on the lights that illuminate the Washington Monument. Katie went to do something else, so it was just me and Peter and the girl who wanted pot (she was beautiful) sitting up under one of the flags at 4:00 in the morning. I had the guitar, and we were lost in our thoughts and in the moment, and I was singing "Soco Amaretto Lime" by Brand New, a soft emotional anthem. I looked up at her and we looked into each other's eyes and hers were screaming and whispering, sharp and dark at the same time, and in them I saw pain and confusion but trust and acceptance, and searching and weariness and most of all a desire to be loved and a desire to love.

Oh how I wish I could find her again and let her lean on me and talk to her about my deep dark secrets and listen to hers and be someone for her to be able to pour out everything hidden behind the mystery in her eyes on. I wish I could be for her the difference between joy and pain, the difference between the fleeting marijuana fix and the continual fix of love and God. Where is she now? What is her life like? Did she cry today, and what about?

Does she have somebody looking out for her, somebody to love? God, I hope so.

Unfortunately, security kicked us off the monument grounds soon after, and we went down the path to the monument and sat on the foot-wide pony walls holding the earth from burying the path. Super-chill Aussie girl met up with us there and she and beautiful eyes talked for a long time while I sat lost in thought and Peter slept stretched out on the wall. Around 4:45 I woke up Peter and made him move down so I could stretch out on the wall too. He had stolen my sleeping bag so I just had his thin fleece bag, but when I woke up he gave mine to me and I slept like a baby. Well, until 7:00 that is, when I was awoken by the bright sun and a gospel choir. I didn't get to say goodbye to beautiful eyes or Katie or super-chill Aussie girl, they were all gone when I woke up.

That night makes me long so much for the hippie life, the simple life, a different life than the one I lead now, but am I just holding onto one utopian night like it exists elsewhere and is it merely a fantasy that somewhere there is a place that's like Displace Me all the time?

That's what my heart aches for right now. Displace Me all the time.

Brasil

I took about 2,000 pictures and they're all stuck on one of the sponsor's laptop. His DVD burner drive broke, so its hard for him to get them to me.

I don't have the pictures.

I'm not going to post about Brasil until I have pictures to illustrate, so yeah...

Dan

"But Dear, you just bought a new camera 10 years ago!"

- Mom, to Dad

Hola/Adios

This is a hello of sorts...

...and a goodbye of sorts. Well, temporarily, anyways.

In about two and a half hours I leave. Yep, 1:30 in the morning! Essentials are packed: M&M's, Pringles, sunglasses. Oh, and some work clothes too, but whatever.

Brazil it is. Or Brasil if you're a real Brazilian. I mean, Brasilian.

To be honest, I'm completely psyched. In fact, I hate it when people spell it "siked."

:)

Do all these paragraphs bother you?

So, my three best friends in the entire world are going to Ecuador. The cool people's trip. Kind of. I don't know. I should stop stereotyping... Yet, strangely, or not so strangely depending on stuff, I am extremely happy about going on this trip instead of that one. Psychological impact from flashbacks from last year's Ecuador trip aside, I really am just glad about this one because I'll get the chance to get closer to a lot of people that I don't talk to that often.

And of course there's the massive awesomeness of going with Peter, one of my best friends, fellow songwriter and guitarist, etc... You can bet your Ferrari on us coming back with at least one new song inspired and written.

Well, if you had a Ferrari. If you don't, well, I guess your house would do.

Speaking of the aforementioned three, if you guys ever happen to read this, right now I miss you like heck. Last three paragraphs said, there is still a part of my heart that goes with you wherever you are, a part that wants the wagon wheels to stay on the wagon, to stay rolling, forever. [forgive the insideness. it had to be said. yes, i know you don't understand.]

Maybe I wish the words so beautifully set to sonority by Coldplay could be true:

I wanna live life and never be cruel
I wanna live life and be good to you

And I wanna fly and never come down
And live my life and have friends around

We never change, do we? no, no
We never learn, do we?

So I wanna live in a wooden house

I wanna live life and always be true
I wanna live life and be good to you

And I wanna fly and never come down
And live my life and have friends around

We never change, do we? No, no
We never learn, do we?

So I wanna live in a wooden house
where making more friends would be easy

Oh, and I don´t have a soul to save
Yes, and I sin every single day

We never change, do we?
We never learn, do we?

So I wanna live in a wooden house
Where making more friends would be easy
I wanna live where the sun comes out ...

This is quickly turning emotional...sentimental even...romantic even? Nah. Not romantic. I was just kidding. Honestly, I really only meant to tell you I was leaving!

You deserve a medal if you've made it this far! And if you've made it this far, well, I guess you can handle a little more. Yes, that's right, I believe in you!

Jesus, I don't know you. That's what this trip is all about. Show yourself to me! Please, you have to. I asked you to after I finally broke down and talked to you, and I couldn't figure out if you did or not. Maybe you were waiting until this trip for more effect. Maybe in my stupid human-ness I missed it... I can't miss it this time. Don't let me try to think about it. Just let me feel it. My heart is where I want you, not my brain. We both know I come out with nothing but doubts when I I try to apply logic to you, so yeah. Do your thing, I beg you.

What am I thinking, of course you will. Give me the faith I've never been able to sustain. Please.

Right, so yeah, I need prayer guys...thanks...I'll try and do my part too. Love to all, and I mean that.

Dan

Here It Goes Again

This video is sweet. I so want to do this sometime:



:)

Pre-Game Analysis

My expert, while biased, comments before last night's AFC Championship Game:

"May the team who scores the most points win!"

Beatiful Insanity

This is why I love Christmas lights:

Yep, it's another zoom-movement-long-exposure experiment thing. Except, this one was different. Instead of "hey, that's kinda cool" when I first looked at it on my camera, it was like, "WOW!" and "I must guard this memory card with my life!"

This one really raised the bar for me. It surpassed by far what I had imagined for this shot. I'm not even sure if could get that much color into an imagination picture!

And I'm only saying all this nice stuff about my own picture because it was luck. And a little skill of course! Haha...

If you'd like to buy prints, the 20x30 will be 100 dollars. That's a good deal, I'm telling you...

The Mysterious Production of Eggs

That, my friends, is the name of this guy named Andrew Bird's album. Brilliant, and how! I've only heard two of his songs, but I can already tell he is awesome. But don't hear it from me:

www.andrewbird.net

Click on listen. And listen. Bet you can't not listen again when its done... :)

Oh, The Pain!

Fourth quarter. Around 2 minutes left. My team is down 27-24, stalled at midfield.

4th down & 10. This play decides the game. This play decides our season.

Garcia takes the snap, and right away there's a blitzing defender in has face, rushing up the middle. As he falls, he puts the ball up, and I hold my breath....

Caught!!! Hank Baskett, the undrafted rookie receiver, makes the diving catch for the first down!!!! [At this point I'm jumping up and down, going crazy...] But wait. I can't believe it:

A flag is down? A flag is down?? A flag, is down. What???

False start on Scott Young, and I want to murder myself. 4th & 15 now, but still do-able, right? RIGHT!!!!

I life my head from my hands to look at the TV. DIRK JOHNSON? What the heck is he doing on the field?? Dirk Johnson is the punter. We can't punt! We only have one timeout. If we punt it to them, we have to keep them from getting the first down, [highly unlikely seeing as the entire game their running back has been creaming us] forcing them to punt it back. Then we would have about 30 seconds to make it into field goal range, just to tie it.

Well, we punted.

And that was it. First down Saints, and the game is over. Our season is over. I love Andy Reid, [head coach] but that was the worst call of the year. Hands down.

27-24. I called that score before the game, except we had the 27! I must have jinxed it. No more calling scores from now on!

In all fairness, it had been a magical ride, for both teams. Last year's Saints, playing without a home due to Katrina, went 3-13. One of the worst teams in the league. This year, they played inspired football on the way to a 10-6 record and the second seed in the playoffs.

Philadelphia, on the other hand, was expected to be at the very least competitive. We started 4-1. Everything was happy. And then, unexplainably, we lost 5 of the next 6, and lost Donovan McNabb, the star quarterback, in the process. Hearts were gloomy in Philly, and almost anybody who said they still believed was lying. Nobody believed. I didn't believe.

And then came Jeff Garcia, the backup quarterback. The team rallied around him beautifully, and they won their last 5 straight to make it to 10-6 and the third seed in the playoffs. I was amazed, and to say it was a pleasant surprise wouldn't quite cut it!

They beat the New York Giants in the first game. 6 straight, 3 to go. And, well, I told you what happened. It was an excellent game as football games go, but the bitter taste of defeat lingers in my mouth, and will for a while. There's always next year, or so they say...

[So, you probably didn't know I was that into football, eh? Yes, its unhealthy at times. I shouldn't let myself be so emotionally involved in something as silly as a game. But...]

Right, so I'm going to say goodbye now.

Goodbye.

Night

Peter described this one as something along the lines of "formidably beautiful." I happen to concur. What about you?