All your base are belong to us.

You know what? My line theory is stupid. It doesn't even make sense. I just thought of a few clever ways to use the word 'line.' The world is so much bigger than that theory. What the crap? I need a new theory.

I'm putting together a list of all the major life lessons I'm learning, both from my personal experience and from the experiences of others. I'm finding that several of these principles begin to overlap after you reach a certain point in your journey. They hit you in waves and seem isolated at the time, but there are some definite overarching themes to be acknowledged here.

LIFE:
Life is a series of moments. Make an effort to remember the ones that count.

There are two meanings for the word "good:" Good/Evil, and Good/Bad.
- In the case of Good vs. Bad, it is simply a measurement of where something lies on the curve of worst to best. In this context, "good" can be replaced with "better" and "bad" with "worse."
- In the case of Good vs. Evil, each is the description of a specific moral or ethical inclination. There is no spectrum; it is black and white.

Justice is not the same as fairness: Fairness deals with "evenness" and equality, whereas justice deals with right and wrong.

PEOPLE:
You can't change a person, you can only change the way you relate to that person, and what you expect from them.

A person's actions are always driven by his/her desires; there are two types of desire: positive (I want this to happen) and negative (I want that to not happen).

By nature, a person's pride is one of the most important things to them. Because of this, we also hold dear a set of particular aspects of our identity, such as our name, reputation and appearance.

Consider the people who give you these four things: Identity, Protection, Accountability and Unconditional Love. These people are your true family, regardless of blood lines.

GROWTH / LEARNING:
True growth hurts: physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally, sociologically, and every other '-ally' word you can think of.

Almost all true learning requires un-learning first.

To learn, one must first be teachable; true teachability is found among the humble and the broken.


This is what I have so far. If any of you have something else to add, I'd love to hear it, study it, and add it.

-R.

My Mix Can Still Beat Up Your Mix.

gravity - intercept

safer times - new atlantic

slipping under - william tell

restless - needtobreathe

car crash - matt nathanson

...and I'll top it off with a quote I read today that I found quite interesting:

"When the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail."

Abraham Maslow

-R.

The Future...

IN THE NEAR FUTURE...

...I plan to put together a collection of paintings to either sell to friends and family and co-workers and co-churchers(?), or to open a gallery show and try to sell to the general public.  Then I will open a separate checking account in which all my painting proceeds will be deposited, and from which all my painting supplies will be purchased.  In theory, the goal would be for the average monthly balance of this account to gradually rise.

...I plan to finish reading one the many books I'm in the middle of - probably either Husbandry by Stephen Fried, or The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Calibourne.

IN THE NOT QUITE AS NEAR FUTURE...

...I plan on buying an Amazon Kindle and using it every night before bed.

...I plan on buying my wife a puppy and a kitten, as close in age and size as possible, so that they will be friends from the get-go.

...I plan on having a $1000 emergency fund for...well, emergencies.

...I plan on either upgrading or replacing my desktop computer, and purchasing a 36-40 inch HDTV.

...I plan on completing the degree I'm working on and starting art school.

IN THE KIND-OF DISTANT FUTURE...

...I plan on purchasing a second vehicle - preferably a car with 35-40 mpg, to use for everything but taking me to work and back, which is like 2 miles from our apartment.

...I plan on building a $40,000 fund for putting a downpayment on a house.

...I plan on becoming a locally known painter.

...I plan on finishing all the books I'm reading through right now, and start reading some kind of biographical book about someone who did something great (Chuck Schwab, Ben Franklin, etc.).

...I plan on completing a degree in graphic design and maybe either painting or traditional animation/illustration.

IN THE DISTANT FUTURE...

...I plan on makin' babies.

...I plan on working (either for a company or freelance) as a graphic designer and working up a portfolio to take to disney to be a traditional (hand-drawn) animator.

...I plan on becoming a fairly well-known name in the painting world, equipped with my own personal studio.

...I plan on paying off one or both of our cars.

...I plan on buying a house.

SOMEWHERE IN THE FUTURE...

...God plans for me and my family to become full-time missionaries in Kenya, Africa, leaving all our possessions behind and committing 100% of our lives and energy to the work of the Lord God Almighty.

When there's nothing that we can't afford to sacrifice,

There's no way they can put out our fire.

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"Belle" of the ball?

just finished a new painting.  Like my hands are still covered in paint.  Check it out.

When I paint, I mentally compartmentalize the entire picture, so that I only ever worry about the stroke I'm making at the moment.  The problem with this lack of "big picture" approach is that I really have no preconception as to what the end product will actually look like.  This painting is the perfect example: the way the colors turned out, I took a step back to look at the completed project, and realized that she is Belle from Beauty and the Beast.

Regardless, I'm pretty happy with it, except for the fact that my signature looks like it was done by an 8-year-old.  I've gotta work on that...

the end.

-R.

Uuuupdate?

Okay, okay okay I know I updated like a day ago but great things have happened. Great things indeed. First off, some randomness.

I look at a lot of files at work - it's what I do. And on these files are the names of various clients. Most of the time it's something like "John Perkins" or something else equally normal. But every once in a while I'll come across names that entertain me more than a big scary monster willow spontaneously humping ferrets on tree-huggers appreciation day. Names like Mercole Stufflebean, Warren Pece, Guy P Greene, and Billy Button to name a few. I love my job.

Speaking of my job, I have more updates. Working with my hands and building things is therapudic for me, and I've been in need of some therapudicness the past couple days. Soooo even though my bonsai tree just evolved into an AWESOME Optimus clone, it underwent yet another metamorphosis, but this time it's more like a growth spurt. Check it out.

Sha-pow! He's like 18 inches tall and completely made out of mail clips. And a cut out piece of post-it note that I colored on. Check out his face. Again.

Oh, and my staple stack wouldn't stand up straight so after fighting it for like 5 minutes I threw it away and started over. But I'm playing it smart this time. I've got a mold that I'm pouring the staples into, and when it's full I'll slide up to reveal my perfect staple stack. And by 'mold' I mean toilet paper tube. It's kind of like a game...which is why I also gave it a back board. Observate.

I know, you wish your workspace was as awesome as mine. It can be, tiny grasshopper, with a little post-its, markers, and imagination...and mail clips and staples and toiler paper tubes and highlighters and a sharpie and some tape and some paper clips and a notepad and a loooooot of free time.

Okay so I got so caught up in talking about my crazy work stuff that I forgot what this post was going to be about. I guess I'll post again later. Like sooner later, not later later.

-R.

Another Update. Hey, that's what blogs are for, right?

My staple stack has grown a bit...

And my mail clip bonsai tree has evolved into a...transformer.

Say hello to my own personal mini Optimus Prime.  Kind of.  Check out his face.

Hah.  I know, it's pretty frikkin' awesome.

Well, work is good but school is kicking my butt.  I guess it's a good thing though, because I've been needing to get my butt kicked recently.  Imagine you're put in an empty room and told "There is a problem in this room.  Solve it."  Well that was me last night.  The room was my life, and the problem was there.  The only thing is, you can't fix it if you don't know what it is.  I can solve problems, but figuring out what the problem is?  That's like giving me a blank canvas and saying "Paint a picture of it" without telling me what it is.

But, after several hours of self-reflection and talking to the mirror, I figured out what the problem is.  All it will take to fix it is time, sacrifice, a constant battle between my flesh and the Holy Spirit inside me, and more time.  But at least I know what the problem is.  And it's good to know my wife is on my team fighting with me and for me.

This is all for now.  I just wanted to chronicle this transitional stage because it may very well play an enormous part in shaping the next few chapters of my life.

-R.

oh, what peace we often forefit

oh what needless pain we bear

all because we do not carry

everything to God in prayer

New Game! Play it.

AHHHH update update update. okay. mmmmmm. ok, I've got it.

My wife and I went to California on our honeymoon, which means Disneyland, the beach, and stupid high gas prices. Whilst at the beach, I invented a sport called wave-punching, where you...well, run up to a wave and punch it. It didn't quite pick up.

Well, I have a new...thing. I'm not calling it a sport, as it requires zero athleticism. To keep with the trend of giving my games ridiculously obvious names, this new one's called staple-stacking.

Yeah. I wasn't kidding. The rules are: 1) they must be used staples - no pumpin' out the staples just to put them in the stack. It's kind of like the unspoken rubber band ball rule where you can't just buy a bag and ball 'em up. 2) no magnets. Nothing can be keeping the staples together but more staples. And gravity. It kind of has a barrel-o-monkeys effect. 3) an awesomely decorated post-it as a base is not a must, but it does add super awesome bonus points. And it could be the difference between your stack looking like a piece of art, and it looking like an upright metallic turd. Here's a better shot with the base:

I have too much free time at work. Well, actually I have two 15-minute breaks every day where I spend 5 minutes breaking and 10 minutes leaving my mark on my desk. How so? Oh, little things, like drawing comic book characters on sticky notes and putting them on my monitor...

...or making bonsai trees out of mail clips...

...or my personal favorite, doodling pictures of dogs barking in japanese at various objects.

Or maybe he's guarding my files that are labeled bilingually...?

Yes. I got snap happy. At work. But I guess it's just because there are so many interesting things to look at on my desk. What's that you say? Super Mario Galaxy is calling out to me and begging me to play it? Well in that case, I must oblige. Farewell my friends, until next time: may your hands never fall prey to idleness, and may your labor produce good fruit.

-R

In the Now: Semi-Interesting and Slightly Amusing

I haven't written in forever, so I feel like I should. The problem is, nothing's coming to my mind to write about.

I picked my brain just now, but the only thing that came up was how annoying I think it is that the E-surance chick is so frikking hot. She's a cartoon. It's just not right. But I guess it's not too abnormal to find a cartoon attractive, since every male over 20 years of age knows he's lusted after Jessica Rabbit at least once.

Speaking of Jessica Rabbit, I found a blog where this dude takes animated notables and uses Adobe Photoshop to manipulate and combine elements from celebrity and model photographs to recreate the toons in such a way as to portray "what they would look like if they were real."

Yeah. It's pretty freaky.

There is a graphic novel series called Flight. There are 5 isses and I want them all. Basically they are compilations of animated short stories that speak through their art more than anything. It's an amazing series to be sought out by casual readers and collectors alike. You should check it out. And then buy the books.

Ok, we're kind of on a roll now...the gears are turning, the fingers are typing...we might actually get somewhere with this post after all.

WARNING:
The rest of this blog post contains material of substance and you might have to put some of your brain cells to work, should you choose to continue. You have been warned.

I got a promotion. Instead of processing the work that the researchers send me, I'm now among the researchers that send work for the processors to do. I'm no longer on the bottom rung of the research/processing food chain. I don't think I've been this happy with my job since I coached gymnastics under Greg Schram. Those were the days.

We've moved from a throw-all-our-bills-in-a-stack-on-the-desk system to a file-them-away-in-a-3-ring-binder system. I've been making some changes in the way we budget, and am in the middle of writing a program that will import bank statements from .html, .xml, or .rtf files into an interactive spreadsheet which will log all of our previous deposits and expendatures, calculate our balances and project future spending based on our previous spending patterns, alerting us of changes we will need to make in order to achieve the most efficient debt/income ratio and build maximum savings. On the side, it will have a calculator in which you input your hours from a printed time sheet and, based on your hourly wage and income tax, it will give you the exact amount you can expect to receive in your next paycheck - to the cent. Suffice to say, we are turning over a new leaf in the financial planning slice of the priority pie chart of our lives.

I've realized that I am not a teacher. I just don't have the gift. What I teach on guitar, you can't really just pick up a book and learn in a week. In fact I haven't yet found a guitar book anywhere that uses my approach about how to learn guitar. But, it's really something that, if I walk you through it for a month or two and you practice the whole time, you'll be amazing and I will have nothing left to teach you and you won't need me anymore. So instead of teaching private lessons, I think I'm going to finally finish a project I start and write my own "how to learn how to play guitar" curriculum. Then, I can pitch it as a course to music stores and high schools and do a two-month structured weekly summer class every year and feel like I'm actually getting somewhere in teaching guitar, rather than wasting other peoples' time and money showing them how to do things they can look up on the internet for free.

If you're still reading this and you're not me, then you're either entirely too interested in my life or just ridiculously bored. Either way, I would advise you turn on your TV and watch the rest of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" because it's probably playing right now on one of the 9 channels you receive on the hand-me-down "bunny-ears" TV antenna you got from your dad when he upgraded to HD. Yeah. I'm reading your blog too.

"My Walk Home"

On my walk home...

...I fell into a lake.
...I ran a marathon.
...I got eaten by a giant tree.
...I lived in a huge house with an extravagant garden.
...I sat on an old rusty chair in my garden and drank homemade lemonade.
...I splashed in a fountain.
...I got hit by a car.
...I fed a homeless man the rest of my lunch that I didn't eat today.
...I carved a rose out of a tree stump.
...I heard silence.
...I had a conversation with a weeping willow.
...I adopted a puppy as a surprise for my wife.
...I stopped by an old beat up baptist church and had a two-hour theological conversation with a portly minister wearing an expensive tie and cheap cologne.
...I sang.
...I rescued a shopping cart from a flooded creek.
...I learned how to fly.
...I rode on the back of a giant armadillidiidae.
...I died.
...I lived.
...I ate gushers.

Oh the thinks you can think.

How true it is, Mr. Seuss, how true indeed.

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...wait. I actually did eat gushers.

My Mix Can Beat Up Your Mix

.....Do You Remember....-....The Summer Obsession
Soundtrack to Your Life....-....Ashley Parker Angel...... .
Written at a Rest Stop....-....Ronnie Day.................
Beat Mamma....-....Cast...............
In The Summertime....-....Thirsty Merc............
........Thunder....-....Boys Like Girls
......Fall Behind....-....Moses Mayfield

Slipping Under....-....William Tell.... .
...............Why Cry....-....The Panic Channel

You know what to do...It will make your day more better.