It frustrates me that the year’s almost two-thirds over and I’m still somewhat stuck in neutral, little from where I was the first of the year. I’ve decided that I should start taking some of my own advice.

In thinking on it today, waiting to get admitted into graduate school, I remembered something I’d often said about the UAH SGA: “We do a great job of setting short-term goals and achieving them, and we have these great, lofty long-term goals that we never seem to achieve. Why don’t we work to align the short-term goals towards the long-term ones, and set some medium-term ones in the interim?”

So, in thinking on this more, I’ve decided that I’ll set a daily goal, a weekly goal, a monthly goal, and a yearly goal. In my waiting today, I got started on a daily goal that’s been hanging around for a bit: reading a goodly chunk of the New Testament each day. But, in thinking on that even further, that’s something that I want to be a habit, not a goal. I differentiate the two, because a habit is something you should do often, while a goal is something that you should ideally do once.

[Before you ask, I'm ambivalent about sharing these goals publicly: it seems braggadocio and fake to make them public, but publicizing it also provides some level of accountability. But crap ... accountability can't really be made to the entire Internet, really. So, ... no.]

As I start to pick up the pace, I figure that I should start getting a bit more serious about non-work things. If I come to any great or small revelations about such a process, be sure that I’ll ramble on about them as if we all should care about it. [You all realize that I do this just so writing my memoirs will be easier, don't you? ;)]

Sean and I talked on the phone the other night—it’d been too long, but that’s my fault—and he asked how things were with the house. We talked as two homeowners in their mid-20s are wont to do, and after a while, he asked me, “So, how many times have you turned and gone towards the mountain?” Meaning, of course, towards my old apartment in Huntsville.

My answer was: “None.” In fact, now that I think about it, I haven’t been east of Jordan Lane since I finished the move out here to Madison. I also haven’t been south of I-565 either, other than my flight out and back to Virginia.

I’ll have to go downtown soon—I like my barber, and I like him enough to drive into downtown—but … for someone who attended a church in far SE Huntsville and lived for three years up on Monte Sano, it’s kinda … surprising to me that I’ve so quickly acclimated myself to living here in the ‘burb.

[And yes, for sheer humor value alone, I bought Ben Folds' Rockin' the Suburbs the first week in July. "I'm rockin' the suburbs / just like Quiet Riot did ..."]

Yes, I subscribe to the Devil’s Dictionary definition of meta. Going forward from that … had an interesting conversation tonight after our Tuesday night movie-watching—Say Anything was great; thanks, Misty—about Weblogging and why we do it. I don’t know why they were talking about it, but for some reason, Misty, Stephen, and Tim got to talking about Dooce and being Dooced and all that … which morphed into a conversation about Weblogging in general.

Now, mind you. I have a handful of Weblogs. [Pause for laughter] I administer, oh, 70 more. I believe in the medium.

It was just weird for me to actually talk about it, because that’s something I never do. One of the last roommates I had didn’t know I ever had a Weblog until the other roommate mentioned it. It really just isn’t something I ever mention in conversation. Shoot, my geek friends know that I have a Weblog, but … no one at work knows. [Or, well, they haven't said anything.] Folks at church never really knew. [Or, well, they never let on.] Whole swaths of my life have no interaction with my writings online.

Which isn’t to say that I’m ashamed of it … or at least I don’t think that I am. Otherwise, I’d make it hard to find me. [I'd have some LiveJournal with some silly-ass nick that only long-time friends would get, and ... yeah. Not that I haven't thought about it, but ... at the end of the day, I believe in openness.]

I guess that I just figure that those who are interested will find out about it, and those that aren’t wouldn’t be interested … so why bring it up?

Of course, the non-blogger in the room had to ask, “WHY would you ever want to do this?” While everyone had a really good reason for why they write on theirs, I … don’t have anything to say other than, “It’s just something that I enjoy doing.” [Understatement.] It’s my hobby, I guess. It’s not anything that I take ultra-seriously—okay, I take Weblogging seriously, but I don’t take much of what I write very seriously. 95% of the time, what you’re reading is the first and only draft. [This explains much, no?]

If nothing else, it’s less frustrating than golf. [Golf's more exercise, though.]

I’m a big believer in the following axiom: “If you have to tell someone about one of your qualities as a person, the chances are that you’re lying.”

I believe in that axiom both from observational and personal experience. Case in point: when I went off to school at MSMS, I took the horribly audacious step of posting my ACT score on the wall above my desk in my dorm room. I wanted everyone to see what a smart person I was!!!

Looking back, I can examine my motives: I was entering a highly competitive academic environment, and while I never had any presumption that I’d be the smartest person there, I wanted to be up at the top. That posting was a warning shot across everyone’s bow.

It was also, in two words, incredibly stupid.

I think we see cases of this all the time: people claiming to be lovable when they’re really pretty prickly; people who state their hotness, when their mama had to hang a steak around their neck just to have the neighborhood dogs play with them; one who proclaims himself a great coder when he’s really just a two-bit hacker, et cetera. I mean, it’s pretty clear that the modifier “self-proclaimed” isn’t a positive thing, no?

Self-proclamations are, of late, right up there with rampant abuse of superlatives on the list of things that absolutely, utterly drive me up the wall. In fact, you might say that I consider myself to be the world’s greatest hater of self-proclaimers.

I’d like to meet someone who isn’t their own worst enemy, just so I could take lessons from them on how to get the hell out of your own way. That would be really, really cool. I mean, if someone wrote a book titled, How to Get the Hell Out of Your Own Way, I’d read it and hope that it wasn’t all full of crap.

The greatest criticism of the U.S. Military is that we’re always seeming to want to fight the last war. Hell, we’re even seeing this in Iraq: Afghanistan worked with airpower + special forces, so … that’s the new formula, right? Wrong. But if smart military people can make these mistakes over and over again—and military types tend to be huge history buffs, so the old saw about those who fail to learn history are damned to repeat it is a bit off, eh?—I guess I can’t have too much more hope for myself.

But yeah, I’m always wanting to fight the last war, too. Sometimes, I change tactics to appropriate ones and things go better, but most of the time, I stick to those early guns and go down in flames. For someone who’s supposed to be smart, I can be spectacularly stupid at times.

I fear that the biggest mistake I repeatedly make is to not step back enough to get a little perspective. I think that’s the unstated raison d’etre for the Sabbath—yes, worship, but also some perspective. Of course, worship is perspective—if you try to live as if there’s more than self, you don’t get so wrapped up in self.

Maybe I should just declare for the NBA draft so I can talk about myself in the third person more often. Geof would like to do that. Geof may be short, fat, and white, but he can hit the mid-range jumper.

[Sorry, this is probably one of those entries that only makes sense if you're rattling around inside my head. Unlike other times lately, I'm not going to get upset if you make erroneous speculation. Comments are open, and the INBOX and cell phone are always receiving ...]

You never can say all you want to say. Again, I’m left unable to say all the things I want to say publicly, but in this case, it’s not matters that directly affect me. It’s just because I hold an unpopular position. If Kasey Kasem ever played stuff from obscure artists like Over The Rhine, well, I’d send this request out to a friend out west … in a rocky place right now, geographically and literally.

“Happy to Be So”
Words and music by Linford Detweiler

Anything I say will be held against me,
so I won’t say much or I’ll spill it all.
By the light of day it’s an elusive feeling,
but every single night that’s immaterial.

I know a love that will not let me go.
My heart is bound and happy to be so.
It’s so happy to be so,
happy to be so,
happy, happy, happy to be so.

If I try to pray, it’s like a game of red rover.
I take a real good run at it, but I can’t break through.
Don’t matter anyway. I’m so redhanded.
The game is over. I’ll just tell the truth.

I know a love that will not let me go.
My heart is bound and gagged and on death row.
It’s so happy to be so,
happy to be so,
happy, happy, happy to be so. Ooh.

I know that I always hate it when people post lyrics and don’t explain a thing about why they are, but I understand that, sometimes, it’s all you have the power to do. With that …

The sidewalk bends where your house ends
Like the neighborhood is on its knees
You’re surrounded by a chain-link fence
That keeps me out but lets me see

Well I come by most every night
The shutters pounding in the breeze
A clothesline strung like paper kites
That blow my words right back at me

But someday when my heart exhales
I’ll tell you everything
These sweet words spilling all about us
I’ll say please please be with me
And I’ll breathe so easily
But instead I’m turning blue
I look at you
And keep my stupid mouth shut

The hall light streams out through the screens
And the shadows capture me in webs
Just tangled up in what I’ve seen
And every word I have not said
I have not said

Cuz the sidewalk bends where your house ends
Like the neighborhood is on its knees

–Hem’s “Stupid Mouth Shut” from Rabbit Songs; written by Dan Messe

For an extrovert, I have strong introvertive tendencies. I mean, don’t get me wrong … I love people, I love knowing lots of folks, and I love connecting people in advantageous ways [job prospects, etc.]. But man … I really do like being by myself a lot, too.

Consider the phone. I really don’t like talking on the phone; it’s a necessary evil. I’d rather talk face-to-face. Why? It’s not so much the desire to pick up on context clues from non-verbal communication—I’m actually pretty bad at that—but rather it has to do with my NADD. I’m so used to lots and lots of input that going to auditory only is hard for me, and things in my locale are distracting. I avoid walking around while on the phone, purely because I’ll run into something I meant to do, and if I’m not talking, I will totally start doing the task and lose track of the conversation.

Anyone who’s ever talked with me for any length of time knows that I love a good tangent. I find that my tangents are easier to follow if you’re in the room with me, because as a visual person, my tangents are often related to something I just saw. [This explains why I also tend to pause the TiVo/turn off the TV when on the phone, especially with my folks. I don't need the distraction.]

Where am I going with all this? :shrug: All I know is that I’m in a real introverted phase today, and sorta have been all week. I have my IM programs off right now, purely because, well, I don’t want to talk to anyone.

I have yet to figure me out. I don’t expect anyone else to do so.

… I would be writing here if the very concept of buying a house in ten days weren’t blowing my mind.

Suffice it to say that my mind is blown.

Share your house-buying stories below if you feel like it.

It’s forever a theme in my life that things go along swimmingly, and then some big interruption happens. Many of these interruptions are positive, mind you, so that’s okay. Sometimes, even the negatives can end up being positives. [For example, Dad's retirement + his networking = me attending MSMS, which made college much easier for me. College was easy, and that made it easy for me to work while I was in school, which led to me being able to have the job I now hold. Etc.]

On Sunday, I started househunting from my couch. Huntsville has a couple 30-minute home shows by different real estate groups, and I TiVo’d them. I found a diamond in the rough, so I started down that path.

Monday. BLAMMO! It looks like I’ll go from a temporary three roommates down to … none. Panic!

Later that night, Michelle and I talk about the possibility of them staying in the apartment until the end of the lease. We plot what to do with furniture. We come to a possible consensus to discuss with Leonard.

Today. I get some response for my roommate call. [Thanks, Luke; looks like I'm okay for now, but I'll help your friend find a place. Friends of friends have to stick together, man.] I go to lunch with PJ. Five sentences in: “Gricelda and I are meeting with a builder this week to start on our house.”

“When would you move out of the townhouse.”

“This summer.”

[Instapause where I mentally lay out what rooms will be what in his house.]

“The look on your face says that you’re interested. What’s up?” I relay my roommate tale of woe. “When is your lease up?”

“End of June. I could extend it if need be. When are you looking to be in your new house.”

“We want to be in there at Christmas. We’re willing to put stuff in storage and live with Gricelda’s parents for a couple of months if we have to.”

“Or you could take a three-month lease.”

“Yeah, that, too.”

“What are you asking?” We discuss prices. His number was what I knew he’d say; I remember what he paid for his house some … what … five years ago, when we moved out of our shared apartment. I remember the appraisal value as well. His number is the appraisal value. “We figured on losing 6% to the realtor. We won’t do that if we go with you. We’ll figure out what to do with that, whether to split it or what.” We share a quick look, knowing that, as friends, we’ll both seek to be fair to the other.

It’s amusing how my life keeps overlapping with PJ’s, even though we’re both very different than we were when we were both undergrads almost eight years ago. Our conversations are still as diverse, erratic, and fast-paced as ever. You know those friendships where you say more with looks and glances than words? We have one of those. Being in his wedding was so fun.

Tonight. I haven’t talked to the parents in too long, so I call. “Here’s what’s up.” They listen. “This all sounds very good.” I am mildly taken aback; I’ve made a set of decisions and explained them, and there’s no criticism [which, with my folks, is constructive and usually well-received, although I can be a hard-headed jackass when I want to be!], and also no advice. Just “Go with that.” Wow. Pretty cool.

“And then there’s another problem.”

Kari and I talked at length today about my moving possibilities and what that means in relation to church. I’ve long resisted changing congregations, but as I really considered it this weekend, as much as I love Aldersgate and have a home there, I don’t have a community there. That’s so important. [Hush, Lara.] So yeah … if I move north or west of here, I’m going to change churches, because I don’t have peers at my church. It’s been hard for me, and I’ve been fighting the move, and the reason why? I’m in service there, and I don’t like to leave service if I can help it. Also, my language for church change involves changing cities and states of residence; my folks do a long process of finding a church, but when we get somewhere, we stay. We find community and we hold to it, dammit.

I look at the community of my old church, Aley, and really want that. The “Lunch Bunch”: us, the Webbs, the Hamiltons, the Ennises, and a couple other families I’m sure I’m forgetting. We had that bond outside of church, going to lunch after Sunday School around 1100 on Sundays, and also doing big things together. The party I remember most from my eight years in Ohio is not for me or my childhood best friend Josh; it’s for Wendell Hamilton, a birthday celebration, I think, where we made fun of his sports car.

So yeah, a lot of changes in a brief period of time. It’s somewhat like a pond: some days, the winds make waves, but it’s generally calm. Then, from time to time, someone catapaults a junked-out Beetle into the middle of the pond and all hell breaks loose … but things return to some sense of stability as soon as the waves fade into ripples into … calm.

It seems such a trite subject to write about, but … right now, I’m really happy with life. Work has its frustrations, sure, but generally, it’s going well. Life as I otherwise know it is going pretty well. The little crap that normally bothers me really doesn’t do so right now.

I find myself whistling a lot as I walk around at work.

Things are just generally kicking ass, and that ass is not mine.

I fear that I far too often journal the crappy times, the hard times, the struggles. I wanted to sit down and write that I’m well and truly happy right now.

Even better … I’ll get to go to a Derek Webb show tomorrow night, and that’s always lots of fun. I haven’t seen Derek in concert since … November. That’s too long for my tastes!

I hope, dear reader, that you’re sharing in my joy. If not, I hope some rubs off on you. This is a good feeling, and I’d love to share.

Today was a very quiet day. In fact, I hardly said a word. If you’ve ever spent time around me, you should know that I love to talk. And talk. And talk. But at times, I need to be quiet and by myself. Chrissy would claim that this makes me an introvert, but I’m too much the “man who knows everyone” to be an introvert. I just like levels. Today’s level was quietude, contemplation, and TiVo-watching. [I finally finished season four of Gilmore Girls. I now have the pilot and the second and third episodes to watch, and I'll have seen the entire show up to this season. If only I'd been TiVoing season five all along. Alas. I have most of it, though.]

I’m sad to report no revelations, no grand adventures. I’m prone to thinking that last night’s restlessness may have been wholly born of weariness. Why? I slept all the way until 1100 today, when I normally am up by 0700 on weekends to wake up and watch This Old House Classics reruns. [If I ever needed another hobby, it'll be woodworking.]

If you follow along closely enough, you’ll wonder if I’m in the midst of throwing away lots of things and sorting other things. I’m not. Why? I’d planned on having an empty bedroom for my use; instead, Leonard moved back in for another couple of weeks before he has a place on his own. No, I’m really not sure why he’s back from Charlotte so fast; I mean, I know, but I know the barest of details, and anyhow, GFMorris.com is not the place to communicate what few details I do know. All I know is that I have three roommates [yes, his girlfriend is temporarily with us] instead of the one I’d planned on having. Combined with the weariness, it made sense to give myself time to recharge.

I really have recharged today. Tomorrow should be more fun-filled than today, but today? Today was great.

At my weariest, I find that I’m the most restless. In the past, this has caused me to make great changes in my life, oftentimes surprising the people around me. I can see how a lot of these changes would seem like that they happen out of the blue—perhaps, in a way, living non sequiturs. I’ve been accused of making snap decisions and then holding to them like a pit bull with his jaw locked: fair accusation.

But if you were inside my head—a nice, scary place, mind you—you’d see that I think about the seemingly instantaneous changes of direction for a good, long time before acting. This thought isn’t always conscious; in fact, it’s rarely vocalized, even inside my own head.

I’m notorious—in my own mind, anyway—for going for a drive when I need to figure something out. I believe in the power of subconscious thinking, of consciously doing something else while letting my mind think-but-not-think about some problem. This often happens at restless points in my life, because when I’m restless, there’s usually some decision that I’m subconsciously realizing that I need to make.

Or so the working theory goes.

About twenty minutes ago, I got up from the keyboard, walked the eight feet into the living room, turned, and walked back. What did I come over here for? Turn. What was I … oh yes, the glass. Water iced, I sat back down. What’s going on in my head? What am I thinking about that I can’t realize? I’m still really not quite sure, because trying to find it means that I’ll just have to chase it ever harder.

It’s tempting to grab my keys, my Birkenstocks, my wallet, and a hat, hop in the truck, and go driving around for a while. But I think that my restlessness might not be from indecision, but more from just general weariness. It was a rough week at work, and while the bossman said I made some good decisions, I’m frustrated that some of the solutions didn’t come to me faster. I’d write about that a lot more, but it gets into ego issues and my place in the office and, well, Google could show me up pretty damn fast. Just know that I’m in a weird position being way younger than my peers. I know that I’ve earned my boss’s trust, but I feel like I have a lot of trust to earn with the other people I work with. Being in this weird place is wearing on me, but honestly, I think that things are going in the right direction.

At the end of every week, I think of the same Over The Rhine lyric: They’ve taken a toll these latter days. It’s so true. I keep wanting to say that it’s cumulative, but honestly, some weeks are easier than others when viewed in hindsight. But man … it’s really corporately kicking all of our asses. I see a lot of tired faces at the office, and I see them in the mirror when I get home.

Weariness breeds restlessness, and so does unresolved thinking. I’m betting on the former, but I may wake up at 0415 to some grand revelation. [I sure hope not, though; I need some sleep this weekend.]

I think my biggest frustration in writing online right now is that I’m hyper-conscious of my audience. A lot of the things I’d like to write about right now could offend or upset people, and I do that easily enough without forethought; to spend time pecking things that I’m quite certain would offend bothers me.

As such, it causes me to quiet myself a bit, to censor self, to shy away from openness. That really goes against the way I write. You may not ever believe this, but I rarely, if ever, draft anything. All those great papers I wrote in high school and college? First drafts, written off the cuff. Do I spend time thinking about things before I write them? Absolutely. But I never commit words to paper or screen before just sitting down and writing. Yes, my writing probably suffers for this, but I find that drafting and endlessly revising sucks the very marrow and lifeblood out of my writing.

So, when I get in this pensive moods and have a lot of things to say, I find that I … don’t say anything at all. Well, I just find other avenues for it; I share things with friends and family as I need to work things out in my head. But most of all, in these worst times, I drive … which was why I was quite glad to go home last weekend to see my folks. Not only did I get to see Mom and Dad—always a good thing!—but I got to spend over seven hours alone with my thoughts. Wondrous.

Maybe I’ll spill some of it … more likely, I’ll tell you old stock stories.

Well, it’s the first day of 2005, and so most of us are trying to decide if we did anything stupid last night, or trying to figure out how to write the new date on our checks, or perhaps wondering what day it is—is it Saturday? Sunday? Monday? Do I have to work today?

Resolutions are a cliché, and the clichéd, “I’m-too-cool-for-school” response is to say, “I resolve not to make resolutions.” I think we all have that as an original thought at least once in our lives, and then we see some idiot say it on Dick Clark’s NYE broadcast and go, “Wow, how stupid does that sound?”

I have simply resolved not to make my resolutions public, and also to not wait for calendar years to roll around to come up with some resolve. I fervently feel that each day—and, if you want to get honest, each hour, each minute, and each second—is an opportunity for us to begin the long road of change.

Yes, change is a long road. Just ask Amy, whose spent the better part of a year working on making herself a more healthy person. If you go and read of her struggle for change—and yeah, people, that’s what it is—you’ll see that it’s been a long road, and there’s still plenty of road left. I’m proud and happy for my friend—not because she’s lost weight, but because she’s made conscious decisions to change things that she doesn’t like about her life and followed through with them. The improved health is a nice side benefit, but honestly, it’s not the most important thing she’s done in this process.

We all face processes like these in our lives. Some of us have great resolve; some of us, not so much. Some of that speaks to personality traits that we all have, but I think that it also speaks to self-awareness. I’m afraid that one reason that we ride the crutch of the New Year is because it is a collective, conscious reminder that Today Is A New Day. It’s all too easy to let the humdrum of life suck you down into the everydayness of it all—every year, you hear people say, “Wow, where did that year go?” You only make those pronouncements when you’ve been so off in the weeds that you’re not self-aware. We’re self-aware on New Year’s and our birthdays and maybe our anniversaries … but that’s about it.

How do you break that habit? You have to practice self-awareness. You have to get to know yourself. You have to try something, start a project, find a raison d’etre. But most of all, you have to stop, look, listen, and know where you are, who you are, and why you are.

I think that’s why David Allen’s Getting Things Done is so darn popular. It speaks of developing a system for self-awareness—it never says so in as many words, but that’s what you’re doing. “What have I agreed to do? What are my projects? What are my goals? What are my next actions?” Those all speak to self-awareness.

If I desire anything for myself, it is for more self-awareness. I think everything else I’d want for myself will spring from that.

So here’s to self-awareness: today, tomorrow, and everyday.