You cannot view a thing correctly unless you love it.  This is true for life as a whole.

Therefore do not think, “Should I love or should I seek truth?” for they are one and the same.

I could never begin the list entitled “Things I’ll Miss” for I would never be able to end it.

What a world.  Blink and you’ll miss it.

What does it mean to be a friend?

I started thinking about this when I began thinking about someone saying ‘I’m sorry I’ve been such a bad friend.’  Now, the fact is, you have been a horrible friend to lots of people.  Think of that one person you met that one time that you see every now and then: you haven’t called them, you haven’t written them, you didn’t pick them up when their car broke down.  By all accounts, you have been a terrible, uncaring friend.  You didn’t even tell them things would get better when they got fired from their job.  Heck, you didn’t even know they were fired. 

The reason, of course, no one thinks this is a problem is that you weren’t really supposed to be a friend to that person.  They aren’t really in your life.  So the people you can say ‘I’m sorry I’ve been such a bad friend’ to are the people that are in your life.  But who is in your life?

People come and people go.  That is the problem.  Sometimes you drift apart from old friends…and that’s that.  It wouldn’t really make sense to call them up and talk about what a bad friend you’ve been…because in a way, you’re not really friends anymore.  You’re not the person they called when they were fired, or when thye broke up with their steady.  Right now, that’s someone else for them. 

It is very easy to define who your spouse is: a spouse is someone you have vowed, probably in public, to do life with.  If you start being a bad spouse, you know who to apologize to.  But there are no contracts in friendship; there is no way of establishing who is definitely in or definitely out.  We talk about our friends after-the-fact.  The people who end up being our friends are our friends; our spouse is who we will love, but a friend is someone we’ve gotten close to.  It is a fact about the past. 

And yet with no contract, who your friends are can also change.  And this is because closeness is often based on proximity. 

I read an article the other day about how Americans have started walking drastically less than they used to.  A person in an agrarian setting walks between 12,000 and 18,000 steps a day; the average American only walks about 5,000.  The article was right about why this is, too: it’s because the places you go are all driving distance apart.  Your school, your work, your church, your home, you grocery store, your library; these are probably all in different parts of the city. 

The day my hatred for facebook was born was sometime in November.  I was alone and listening to the song Suburban War by Arcade Fire, a song about the loss of old friends.  In it Winn Butler sings,

Now the music divides us into tribes
You grew your hair, so I grew mine
You said the past won’t rest
Until we jump the fence
And leave it behind

And my old friends,
I can remember when
You cut your hair
We never saw you again
Now the cities we live in
Could be distant stars
And I search for you
In every passing car

That night made me realize all the people I was friends with on facebook who were just like Butler’s friends: you grew up with them, but then they left.  Cities don’t magically become connected when a person’s picture is on your computer; your lives are more so distant stars.  There are people I look for in cars, and it’s never them; just a ghostly semblance, probably someone else who is in a different city than all the people they grew up with.    

Thus, one of the things that determines friends, that can let you say ‘I’m sorry I’ve been such a bad friend’ to someone, is proximity.  This is why high schoolers use that phrase more than others.  You see your friends everyday in high school; if you aren’t being a good friend, it becomes apparent. 

But we don’t meet with the same people in the same building for broad swaths of the day anymore; that is an era of the past.  And the problem this brushes over is the one of affection.  The way you grow affection for other people is by being around them all the time.  People you don’t even really see yourself with, you will grow affection for if you are around them enough.  You will start to see the way their habits work, the way they integrate things, the way their personality responds to different situations. 

But if you aren’t around people all the time, you will probably judge that they wouldn’t be very good for your life, or you will think they have a limit; you will only go so far out of your way for them.  Friendships do not thrive on such a basis; it is rare that there is someone that is perfect for you.  Other people are actually much different than you, and if you choose to only intimately know the ones that are like you, you will live a very lonely life.

I have never been very cosmopolitan, and so my life is in fact quite local.  I live in a house with six other people who go to my church, which is about a fifteen minute walk away.  In between my house and church is where I work, and right across the street is the school I am going to graduate from.  All right there, nothing more than about a fifteen minute walk away.  And this has let me get to know some people quite well; I see people’s lives, each of the places that comprise what they do.  It lets me know what they’re talking about when they tell stories.  It’s incredible, and I love that it ended up this way, that I know the people I do.  But of course, things do not stay; I will graduate, I will move, maybe switch jobs….and slowly everything will spread out, and I’ll be just like everyone else. 

Friendship is something about which Christians and nonchristians take very different attitudes.  I find that nonchristians value friendship much higher than Christians do, and marriage much less, while for Christians it is the other way around.  Many nonchristians I know do romances on the side of their life of friendships, and when they fail, it is fine because they have their friends.  Christians, on the other hand, see marriage as a main goal of life, the thing to do, and friendships are the things on the side. 

It might not be surprising to know that I like the nonchristian view here; I think that one should aim at having friends, and build your life around that.  The deficiency in the typical nonchristian view, however, is that they do not value time-grown affection; they often get rid of people they do not ‘like’.  (Christians do the same thing and shouldn’t.  But my house at least is an attempt in the other direction.)  Then, of course, even the people they do ‘like’ they often find they do not totally like.  ‘Love your enemy’ ends up applying to everyone we know at some point or other.  And thus, they too end up in the world of rotating friends, of life mobility, of unknownness. 

That is why friendship is a fading art.  Your closest friends may be based on similarities, but you will only feel close to other people if you are around them a lot because you are forced to be.  But we aren’t forced to be around others, and so you only meet up with people by going out of your way to do so.  But the less you are around others, the less you see a reason to go out of your way for them; a fine catch-22 if there ever was one.  The world has spread itself out, and we have quietly felt the effects. 

There is no tidy solution to this; the problem is distance, and if the different parts of your life aren’t close together, what can you really do about it?  I remember years ago reading a Xanga that said it is worth staying in a city to keep your close friends.  I was young and had never thought of moving away for a job, so I thought that was very interesting.  The thought is perhaps the only basic one we can wield against the modern world’s vastness: be intentional about keeping something.  For just as the two words I’ve learned about so many times in life is ‘You’ll forget’, the two words I would suggest are true of a friendship staying if you don’t try to make it are: It won’t.

Maybe life is a symposium, a medley, a composition of many little things.

I liked Finding Nemo better before I found out that Ellen Degeneres is the voice of Dory. Before Dory was a fish off in the ocean, but now I know that it’s really someone on land, and that they have a TV show that airs every day, and I’ve started to think that maybe there isn’t really any Dory at all.

Whenever there’s a speaker that describes someone who did something bad but doesn’t want to single them out they say ‘You know who you are’. Then I think ‘So the person who did it knows who they are . . . was it me? Well, do I know who I am?’ and then I have an existential crisis right then and there.

The other day I was at a bar with a girl named Chelsea and she said she wants to get her pilot’s license. Then later she told a story about how when she was a kid she found an egg all by itself in her backyard, and she put it in a box and it hatched into a duck. I asked her if she had seen Fly Away Home and she said yes, and then we all went around and talked about which plane movie we would be if we were a plane movie.

Her mom made her put the duck back by the empty nest and we think it died.

I’ve been reading about laws in my astronomy book, like Kepler’s laws, and Newton’s laws, and I think it’s nice for scientists that they have such an easy way to determine if they were significant.

I wonder if there was ever a scientist who figured something out but it was actually really easy to figure out, but he just kept quiet and let everyone praise him and name a law after him, and all the time he went around with the secret in his head that it was really quite simple.

Tonight my little brother asked, “How much time in life do we actually save by using abbreviations?”

My friend Alex doesn’t like when people don’t close doors in movies. He pointed it out today when Frodo didn’t close the door to Bag End. I don’t like when they don’t say goodbye on the telephone. A few days ago I watched Don Draper say ‘I’ll think about it’ and then hang up the phone on Mad Men. Did the other guy then go ‘Don…? Don, are you still there…?’

Childhood seems like this wondrous time in our lives, but it didn’t seem like that then. Maybe right now is a wondrous time in our lives too?

Alex got a tattoo of Ryan Gosling on his calf and I think it’s the stupidest thing he’s ever done. A few days later he got a spider bite on his other calf that swelled up and he had to go to urgent care, and he hates it so much, but I told him on the bright side now his legs are symmetrical because they both hurt to look at.

Yesterday I was asking a girl at work ‘Are you in or you out?’ because another employee and I were going to leave and start our own restaurant, but she hadn’t heard that part so she asked ‘What are we talking about? Belly buttons?’

When I read about ancient cultures having different dating systems it makes me feel how a lot of my conception of the world is unnecessary. And then I think about how God has room for all the people, people whose concepts and cultures and likings and activities and worlds are so different from mine, and that seems amazing.

Ancient sea travelers used the stars for navigation. I wish I had that much need for the stars in my life.

Have you ever called that number that’s on vans and trucks that says ‘How’s my driving?’ I’ve called that number before. You should call it, at least once.

Most of my thoughts start with ‘Maybe’. I wonder if I’ll ever start thinking in declarative sentences.

I have been riding my bike everywhere but I don’t know if I should get a helmet or not so I decided to count how many other people wear helmets, and the first one to fifty wins. Right now the non-helmets are beating the helmets 39 to 33. (They made a huge comeback; the helmets used to be winning 26 to 20.) But really I should just get a helmet because I care about my head. And my brain is the one that is doing the thinking, shouldn’t it have already made me get one out of self-interest? Who exactly is running things up there?

Earlier I was driving in my car thinking about people’s goals in life, about their visions of happiness. The main difference between other people and me is that their conceptions are all false while I don’t have one at all; what does a successful life look like? I think about the Kingdom of Heaven and want to know what it looks like; is it just people who are all virtuous? But we don’t start virtuous; how do we get there while we have to include people who fail all the time, who fail a lot? If we want to be part of the Kingdom, where do we drive, what should we say? Do we pray a lot and do those prayers get answered? Do we feel something while we pray? I want to know the specifics so I can tell another person what the Kingdom of Heaven on earth is like, and they will agree it is a great thing and they will come along and drive those places and say those things too.

We’re somewhere between brokenness and beauty, that much seems certain.

Yesterday I got hot grease all over my arm and it hurt for awhile and now there are red splotches all over it.

My mom is in her fifties and a few months ago out of nowhere she said ‘Food doesn’t really do much for me anymore.’ Is that really how it will be? One day I’ll wake up, and food will mean nothing? The small senate in me that’s in charge of which foods I eat refuses to believe it.

Tornado sirens let you know when it’s time to go outside and look at the sky.

I always wonder what the songwriter was thinking when they wrote the lyrics. Were they thinking ‘What am I feeling, and how do I put it into a song?’ or were they thinking ‘I’m in a band, so I’d better make this sound deep’. I try to listen to people that think in the former way rather than the latter, but sometimes it’s hard to tell.

Whenever I find a coupon after it has already expired I always imagine explaining to a store employee ’But I didn’t know about it until now . . . so I didn’t even have a chance. An how is that fair?’  I think coupons should say ‘Good for ten days after you find it’. 

We played Taboo as a family tonight and I didn’t know what ‘QVC’ or a ‘cowlick’ were. I don’t like not knowing what things are.

Yesterday I was upset about things as I got into bed so I read a philosophy article I knew I would agree with and fell asleep thinking, ‘Ah  yes…of course nominalism is true, that’s exactly right…’  People de-stress in very different ways. 

See how many things are in our lives? What about you, what has happened in your mind recently?

It’s been a pretty stupid last couple weeks.  I mean….I guess weeks can’t be stupid.  I’ve been stupid.  That’s what I meant to say.

One day I was looking everywhere for my car key.  I had thrown it in the trash can on the sidewalk. 

A day later I dropped my cell phone in the trash and when I pulled it out it was all slimy.  So I rinsed it – very quickly - in the sink.  No matter how many people I tell this story to, they all laugh at me.  Was I supposed to know that this was a bad idea?

Nothing happened at first, but in the middle of the night the phone started vibrating and wouldn’t stop.  He died a slow, painful death.  I had work that morning and no sure way to wake up so my body just kept waking up out of nervousness.  Nervousness is the best alarm clock.

My little brother has been really funny recently.  The other day he said: “You know, technology gives parents huge leverage over their kids for doing chores. They can say ‘Clean your room or you can’t play any video games.’  What did they do before video games? ‘Clean you room or you can’t do your crossword puzzle.’”

He just comes up to me and says these things.

Yesterday in class my ancient astronomy teacher asked, “And Kepler was able to form his theories based on all the data gathered by….?”

No one answered him so from the back of the classroom I said, ‘Brah’.  He said, “Yes, Tyco Brahe.”

What can I say.  Brahe was my broheim. 

Yesterday I got a bike and I am very excited for it.  Was I ever excited for new toys as a kid?  I’m not sure.  If I ever have been, it’s been awhile, but I am very excited to ride a bike places.  Of course, I should have gotten a bike five years ago for college, so I guess I am five years behind.  But that’s ok, because maybe while I’m riding I’ll see cars with Bush for President bumper stickers, and that will make me feel better.

My cell phone, by the way, has made a gradual recovery.

Hmmm….looking over this I realize that ‘ancient astronomy teacher’ might be taken to mean the class is ancient astronomy.  The teacher is old.  That is the point.  Ancient astronomy doesn’t really make sense….because it makes too much sense.  Most astronomy is about the distant past.  You might as well take a course in numerical math, outdoor meteorology, or elitist world cinema.

Be creative today! And remember if your knees aren’t green by the end of the day…you may need to seriously re-examine your life.

It’s a strange thing that things take a long time to unfold. Even stranger is that we have no idea these things are happening.

But after awhile someone will look back and realize that it was happening all the time. They’ll say in the sixties people were becoming materialistic, that in the sixteen hundreds they were becoming individualistic, that modern people now look at nature as a thing to be conquered and mastered through scientific understanding, rather than a thing before which we should feel awe for its wholeness and beauty.

But this is maddening. I am an arrow aimed at a million cultural targets; but what if I don’t want to be aimed at all of them? Or even any of them?

Some think we are very privileged to live in the twenty-first century, with all of our comforts and medicine, and I agree most of the time. The other times I think about eating disorders, divorce, schizophrenia, the fragmented social world, pornography, and I have to wonder if we are the lucky ones.

How come we do things that we can’t know we are doing until we do them for awhile? You don’t joke around with the checkout cashier one time, and it’s just because of one bad day. But two years later you don’t even look any cashier in the eye anymore, and you realize you’ve become just another somber and serious stranger in public.

What if I’m drinking a poison right now? A slow change in an attitude, the dripping away of some passion, the subtle change of an idea, the forgetting of something right. Why can we only see who we are in the past?

I’m nervous about everything I do because it might be headed down one of these paths, a blindfolded story that ends in a sad realization. Becoming a career hunter leads to a job in another city where no one knows you. Not getting a job means having no way to sponsor anyone else’s life, wife or child. But doing nothing means you just keep heading wherever your immediate culture tells you; there is no option of not doing anything. Not walking a path isn’t an option; life takes you somewhere.

Isn’t there a way to avoid every big fallacy we see other people falling into? Or will there always be one we didn’t see? One we couldn’t have seen?

I don’t want to scientifically conquer nature in my mind. I want to live in a universe where I can see what glory they saw thousands of years ago, where my mind will still allow my soul a drink.

A few months ago I was walking into a bathroom when I realized my whole life I’ve been trying to express what I feel; just one true feeling at all.

You can love someone so much, but a carelessly dropped comment can roll into a conversation where you feel misunderstood, and so do they, and it eventually seems like neither of you care about each other. This happened to me on the phone recently, and I wondered, how does this happen? How can something happen you didn’t mean to? I guess the only way to avoid these things is to stay vigilant, and know what it looks like in advance. But that is very hard to do, and all of our lives end up looking some accidental bad way we didn’t intend.

The mind and the body are alike; the health of each depends on nourishment, on feeding them things they need. St. Paul tells us to dwell on the good, the excellent, the noble, the pure. Once we find the well we must not stop returning to it, otherwise we will be tying our own blindfolds, eventually forgetting it was we who did so.

So many things seem emotionless until the very end. But then the end comes: the astronaut makes it to outer space, the summer with your friend ends, Gatsby suddenly dies. And you realize what it meant all that time you were building up to that moment. It is a deep secret, but values are packed into dull moments, into seemingly meaningless events, but in the end when you see how it all connects you realize that it was all too big for you, that life hides its beauty until the end of things.

But we must not be fools next time; if we see its value in the past, that means it is valuable in the present. A life fully realized is to have nostalgia in advance.

So many things happen in slow motion all around us without our permission; we must not fall asleep.

You don’t meet a person until you meet their death too. 

Those trees were lucky to be outside, with the deathly winds taking them far away from the earth.  The students had to stay in the library, stuck in a windless universe.  The books blacked out the windows; some say that books are windows, but those people died childless.

“Is that chemistry you’re studying? I took chemistry last semester.”

“Do me a favor.”  She hid inside a coarse striped sweater that covered a steam-pressed blouse.

“Anything.”

“Don’t fit me into your romantic scheme of life.”

Every student knew they could leave, they could head out the library doors and walk far away.  But none of them did; and what’s a freedom you have but don’t use?

They married in a cemetery, their children watching from the future.  The amaranths were in bloom and they hoped their lives would follow suit, but hope without strength means nothing.                                  

He was pudgy now, a full cup of coffee for a chin.  They sat in the cafe and listened to the violin concerto as it rained listlessly on the windows and the bustling workers behind the counter tried to dream of their own future significance and the men sliced the table in half with their business-motioning hands and the jelly-smeared children ran away from their plunging mother.

“What happened to us?” he asked.

“You stopped being curious about me,” she dented, her crimson lips dropping the words like a nest out of a tree.     

“Are there deeper things than feelings?”

No one in the coffee shop knew and they drove silently home that night and laid down next to each other, and no one in the coffee shop knew that either.

That night she did not sleep, her hair now as coarse as her sweaters were in the sixties.  She glided into the city with its frightening towers but she was unafraid.  His wrinkly eye corners followed her with all the fear in the world.  On top of her office building she stared off into the city wilderness, and he tried to forget about how beautiful she looked. 

Gravel scattered across the roof top formed into a small mound beneath her caring hands.  Her hands pressed on the mound with nostalgic attention, not at all like people driving by roadkill, much more like the giant black sky that surrounded them. 

She slid her hands onto her knees; her bangs drooped as she cried.  She cried and cried, and the sound of cars on the distant highway were drowned out of the world of meaning.

He watched her from behind the skywalk door.  He took off his glasses.

‘It was your humanization that depressed me most’ he wrote later.

She flipped like an acrobat through the rest of life, and her smiles said everything he needed to hear.  He wrapped himself up, said no to his selfishness, prayed to every god he could that his reflexive need to bind beauty to himself would die. 

His thin hair whipped over his chalky head as he rigidified himself before her grave.  ‘I tried, I tried to be here all along.  Maybe I wasn’t the best husband.  But I tried to be right here, at your end.’

The only man who could be alone before her, he lifted his blurry vision to meet the windy and decaying world. 

‘Now you are as free as the trees.’