Nay, we are but men. Rock!

Since moving from WV to OR there have been some pretty significant changes to my lifestyle.  The most significant change is probably with the friends I have here.  The friends we have here are much more natural than anyone else I have ever hung out with and they are claiming my wife.  Now in WV when someone was referred to as natural what it really translated into was stinky.  This is definitely not the case here.  Our friends are not stinky they merely have a commitment to living with green and sustainable practices.  This is great but it has an effect on my life that is getting to be a bit much.  We now make our own cream cheese, bread, and shampoo.  We are in a free range organic egg co-op.  My wife wants us to spend $9 on raw milk.  We recycle or compost everything.  We use cloth diapers which I have to carry dirty bath water from the bathtub to the washing machine in order to wash.  All of that to say I try and do my part. The problem comes when I find myself in a restaurant with our friends I never want to order first because I don’t want to order the wrong carbon footprint meal but I hate ordering last because then I feel like I need to follow suit and order the steamed salmon, water chestnut, and leek tartar.

Don’t get me wrong, I am truly committed to creational stewardship and all that jazz but too much of a good thing apparently leaves me hungry.  I want to be able to get a McRib, that’s right suckers I said McRib, and not have to eat it in my son’s closet in fear of being discovered.  I want to be able to walk down the street with my head held high while letting the grease from my Oregon Burrito lovingly caresses my chin.  I want to be able to eat a steak without someone who claims to be my friend asking me if I know how much methane a cow produces in its lifetime and why am I not eating tofu.

I say enough is enough.  It is football season and I refuse to mask my love of cheese product and sausage.  I am going to fly my greasy pizza flag high.  I don’t want to go back to my old ways but I do want the occasional guilt-free chili dog.  Who’s with me?

I know my last post was a little off the beaten path for this blog so I decided to offer a little ditty that is more in line with what I normally put out there.  Last night I was giving my sons a bath.  II like doing bath time because they are to the point where they actually play together instead of just occupying the same general space.  This time of year is probably the busiest season I have and put on top of that all of my family issues I have very little energy.  So the boys were playing and I was staring off into space and focusing on absolutely nothing.  Then from off in the distance I hear my oldest son screaming, “Ahhhh!!!!! Ahhhh!!!!! Noo!!! Phineas no!!!!!”  I came out of my trance and looked over to the bathtub where I saw my youngest son pulling with a double-fisted vigor that said, “Now who’s in charge chump” on my oldest son’s penis.  My youngest was having the time of his life and laughing hysterically while my oldest was, needless to say, not.  He was flailing around like an uncoordinated stork doing the Macarena at top speed.  

I was stuck somewhere between complete levity due to the poetic justice of the situation and pure revulsion at how far a three-year-old’s penis can stretch.  I opted to take the humanitarian approach and release my oldest from the Hungarian penis torture that was my youngest son’s fists.  I really do think they love each other.

My life tends to follow a certain pattern.  I will have one or two major life questions that are at the forefront of my mind.  I will spend anywhere from three months to a year diving into whatever question is before me and then I will have a down period where I won’t really think of anything of more depth than the Broncos or comparing and contrasting all of the Die Hard movies.  

The issue that I have been wrestling with lately is where is God in the midst of suffering?  I have been thinking about this ever since I read a novel called The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell.  All throughout my life I have heard people talk about God’s will in regards to pain and brokenness.  I would hear one person say to someone who has lost a loved one, “It’s OK they are in a better place now.  Sometimes it is hard to know the why but it was his will.”  It’s true that the person who has died might be in a better place and it is hard to know the will of God but to say that God caused so-in-so to die because it was part of his will is not entirely accurate.  I have an extremely hard time thinking that the God of love, grace, mercy, redemption, and life causes death and heartache.  I think we cause all of the crap that is in the world and God works with it.  I think to say that God causes death is to rob him of his redemptive power.  I serve the God who defeated death, not brought it about.  I believe God can take the s**t in our lives and redeem it.  He takes what was never intended and brings it into himself, where it finds love.  When someone talks about the silver lining I hear God’s hand at work.  When someone verbalizes some joy that has come out of great suffering I hear a God that refuses to abandon us. 

No, I serve a God of redemption and a God that will always bring us close even through the worst circumstances not a puppeteer that forces death and brokenness onto his creation for his own amusement or to accomplish a greater good.  The greatest good was defeating death and mending brokenness.  My uncle committed suicide yesterday.  I am not sure where the redemption is going to come from but it will come.  I am waiting with my God for the silver lining.

Here I am sitting in my house three days before I was scheduled to be home from my backpacking trip.  I checked the calendar before I left and sure enough it said August.  I checked the map and sure enough I was heading to central Oregon.  Then why in the name of everything that is holy did the weather act like something out of a Charlton Heston movie?  When we got to the trailhead it was sunny and about 104 degrees, typical for the geography and time of year.  That night the wind moved in, 30-35 mph gusts.  The next night the lightning moved in to go along with my friend Mr. Wind.  The night after that Rain Jr decided to show up to the party.  And last night Rain Jr’s father Papa Downpour decided to dance on the face of my shelter with his friend Cyclone Jim.  I mean there were torrential downpours and wind gusts upwards of 45 mph or more.  Last night was probably the most miserable night I have ever spent in the wilderness.  I was laying in my rain-soaked down sleeping bag looking up at the bottom of the tarp and just waiting for it to give way and fly off into the night leaving us even more unprotected.  Somehow our knots held and the shelter construction held pretty well through the night; I only had to get out and tie down the tarps two or three times throughout the night.  And did I forget to mention I FORGOT MY RAIN GEAR!!!!!!!!!  This was my fourth time taking college students into the wilderness for a week and never before had I ever encountered even a drop of rain.  Last night sucked.

Other than the weather that was more unpredictable than Cher on her wedding night the trip was pretty good.  The students I had were great and rose to almost any occasion  with high spirits.  They worked together and surpassed my expectations.  They were encouraging and supportive of one another.  They never questioned my decisions.  In short they were pretty awesome.  But the weather blew.  While on the trip I had to keep my tongue and watch what I said in order to set the right kind of example.  I needed to keep morale at a high level.  Now I could care less.  I want to vent.  I want to complain.  I think I am done.  Thank you for listening, or would it be reading?

Tomorrow morning at 7:00am I will be leaving with roughly 10 college students for a week-long backpacking trip in the Sisters Wilderness Area in central Oregon.  I look forward to this trip every year and this time around is no exception.  There are no real wildfire threats this year and I have been lunging like there is no tomorrow.  It is time to see if the lunges are really going to pay off.  There are many last minute preparations left for me to do, not the least of which being to give myself a haircut and hope that the week allows it to grow in a little before rejoining society.  

I have a large and slightly misshapen cranium and when my hair is shaved I look like a fuzzy albino potato.  My wife is already on a camping trip with my sons so I can’t ask her to do it and if I leave my hair the length it is now I am pretty sure my brain will jump out of my ear in search for a cooler environment.  So off I go.  Wish me luck and maybe I will post pictures when I get back.

So today is my wife’s birthday and two of her best friends came over to bring her ice cream and apparently talk all of the oxygen out of the earth.  It was good times for a while we were all joking around and I felt like I actually live here.  Then the subject changed to the diva cup.  It was this point in the conversation that I was banished from my own living room.  I’m not talking about a civil, “Hey Ben I know you live here and I respect that more than you will ever know.  Could you please leave so I could discuss something that could make you feel a little uncomfortable?  I know this is a little inconvenient so feel free to get a little more ice cream as payment.”  That is what I would expect, or at least that is how the conversation would go in my head.  What I got was, “Go check your email so that we can talk.”  

You need to understand the level of trepidation I am feeling right now.  Every time these women get together something bad happens to my life.  When they first became friends I had to start washing Ziplock baggies.  Later I had to leave the kids’ bath water in the tub so that I could use it in the washing machine or on the garden.  Then I started using a rock as deodorant.  Something bad always happens whenever I get kicked out of a room.  I’m afraid when I walk back in there they’re going to tell me that I can only brew and drink soy beer or something.  

The jokes on them though.  I’m not checking my email. I’m writing this post and I’m eating the rest of the ice cream anyway.  That’s right ladies you can’t control my life.  I’ll do what I want when I want to do it in my own house.

Every year as part of my job I lead a team of 10 college student leaders on a 7 day backpacking trip in the Sisters Wilderness in Oregon.  It is one of the best parts of my job description.  I really love the day to day work that I do with these leaders but to actually get to go into the back country for a week and get paid for it is pretty cool.  Our program has built into it 4 main elements used in the learning/development process: Solo, where they are on their own for about 24 hours, Leader of the Day, where two of the leaders are responsible for all of the decisions made for the day from traveling to setting up camp to meal schedule, Final Expedition, where the guide and I leave during the night and they are responsible for getting safely to the trailhead, and Summit, where, you guessed it, we give summating one of the Sisters a whirl.

All in all it is a pretty sweet deal.  I get to be part of breaking in some students who have never been in the wilderness before and be part of furthering their leadership skills on the whole.  What I don’t like about it is the masochistic training schedule our university’s strength and conditioning coach put together for us.  I swear this cat must be endorsed by the National Association for Lunging Lungers.  Every day has you doing 764 more lunges than the previous day.  I don’t know what’s worse, doing the lunges now or summating a 10,000ft mountain without doing them.  Personally I am leaning toward not doing them since it is only one day of the trip instead of every day leading up to it.  On the bright side though my tush now deserves to be cast in bronze and put in the Louvre. 

This evening I remembered a conversation I had with my wife a month or so ago.  At the time I thought, ” I need to remember to put something about this on the man blog. So here it is.  You may recall a while back our illustrious vice president making a comment about his lineage during a press conference.  The comment went something like, “I have Cheney’s on both sides of my family and I’m not even from West Virginia.”  When I heard this I was furious and I mean mad.  It was the type of thing that the more I thought about it the more angry I became.  When I shared this with my wife she asked, “Why are you so worked up about this?”  I replied, “We are both from West Virginia.  How can you not be upset?”  I went on to explain that the real reason I was mad was that being from West Virginia we have grown up hearing the negative WV jokes, having to deal with the stunned looks from people when they find out we are educated and from WV, and explaining to people in Oregon and other parts of the country that WV is an actual state and not merely western Virginia.  For some reason people in the rest of the country seem to think we are all back hills, incestuous, banjo playing, moon shine making, no shoes wearing, one-toothed bumpkins.  I have come to accept that everyone from West ‘By God’ Virginia gets painted with the same brush.  People are allowed to be misinformed and make assumptions about other people groups.

What I do have a problem with is when the person who would be president if anything ever happened to Bush, who wouldn’t even be in office without WV by the way, chooses to perpetuate the hillbilly stereotype on a national stage.  It is impossible for any state to rid itself of unfair labels when those charged with caring for and running the entire country, not just those states with oil, choose to further ignorance.  This is not an anti-Bush/Cheney political rant, we can get into pure politics at another point.  This is a, “Those with power of influence over others have a responsibility to make sure the things they are saying are not bigoted, misinformed, ignorant, racist, or perpetuating stereotypes” rant, I know it doesn’t just role off the tongue.  If someone claims to love and serve this country, as Dick Cheney does, they should love and serve the country as a whole.  If they don’t want to do that they should at least stop short of actively damaging the reputation of the parts they couldn’t care less about.

Last Friday, the 4th of July, after my half-marathon my wife got the call that her grandmother died.  We made arrangements and she flew from Portland to Pittsburgh that night on a red-eye.  The difference between this trip and the last time she flew out is that this time I have the boys.  There is one similarity between the trips however.  I get bored without my wife.  I know this may make me sound pathetic but she is the idea generator and I am the doer in our relationship.  Obviously there are times when I have ideas and she obviously does a lot but generally this is how it works.  I have no idea how to keep these two over-active pygmy marmosets entertained.

This evening I took the boys to get my wife’s birthday present, which is still 23 days away so I am ahead of the game by guy standards.  I went to a store at a local upscale mall because I had an idea on what I would like to get her, which I won’t disclose yet because sometimes she reads my posts.  I will however tell you that it is awesome.  On a scale from 1-10 of awesome birthday gifts with 1 being doughnuts and ten being a diamond ring it ranks at about Macho Man, who would obviously be 12.  When I got to the store I walked up to the display of Macho Man birthday gifts and froze.  I was completely overwhelmed.  I was so overwhelmed that when the sales associate asked me if I need any help I’m pretty sure what came out of my mouth was, “I need good… Can you tell me… I think I would like to mfmdphphph… Come on kids we’re leaving.”  

After we left Macho Man Inc we drove home but I still couldn’t think of anything to do with the boys, and they were strapped in, so we kept driving around the neighborhood.  After the third time circumnavigating the community, once I started getting strange looks from the neighbors like I was casing their houses, we went home and my oldest and I drew with sidewalk chalk while my youngest ate it.

I need help.  I need to know what to do with my kids in the evenings.  I need to know how to not get too overwhelmed when I make another attempt at birthday shopping tomorrow.  I need my wife to come home.

I tried to muster up the energy to write this yesterday but as it turns out the only thing I had energy enough to do after about 10:00am was to eat, and I mean eat.  Whatever I could get close to that wouldn’t run away was mercilessly devoured.  I ran my half-marathon yesterday morning and it was one of the most difficult things I have ever done.  Let me take you through the timeline of the day:

4:30am       Wake up

5:00am       Leave with a friend for the race

7:00am       Start running at a pace that I’m sure made some turtles snigger

7:05am       Start wondering why I was doing this

8:30am       Become convinced that I was doing something completely stupid

9:15am       Wonder why the organizers of the race chose a course that continually lengthened itself

9:59.47am  Find my Holy Grail known as the Finish Line

A friend and I ran/walked 13.1 miles yesterday and I have no idea how it happened.  First off I was working myself through a 12 week training schedule to prepare for the race.  Due to some circumstances with family that far outweighed my running schedule I lost weeks 6-10; so basically I trained for 6 weeks, took a month off, trained for 2 weeks, and ran a half-marathon.  Oh, and did I mention that I weigh roughly the same as a baby bull elephant?

The first hour and a half of running wasn’t that bad, if you can believe that.  After about mile 9.5, however, I felt like I moved from the speed of an excited slug to that of a three-toed sloth on morphine.  There were a couple of reasons why I was able to finish.  The first reason was Christ.  I know that that might sound like any number of professional athletes on TV that give glory to God before going on to tell everyone how great they are but it is absolutely true.  My wife and I use prayer beads to help with the discipline and consistency of our prayer lives.  Prayer beads are basically a Protestant version of the Holy Rosary, but since Protestants apparently can’t be associated in any way with the wonderfully rich Catholic faith we get the term prayer beads, beautiful huh?  But anyway, I would run through the prayers in my head and it would take about 20 minutes at a time.  While I was going through the prayers I was fine but the moment I stopped I would hit a wall.  You could say that the only reason the prayers made running easier because it distracted my mind and let me focus on something else for a while, I just wouldn’t believe you.

The second reason I was able to finish was because of other runners.  I began the race with a good friend of mine.  We had decided to run together a while back.  He is in better shape than me and a fair amount smaller, though he himself is a big guy, so he was faster than me.  Despite this fact he chose to stay with me and put up with all of the times I needed to walk when he would have, I’m sure, preferred to be running.  But because we are friends we ran together.  It wasn’t until somewhere between miles 9 and 10 that I was able to convince him that it was alright if he went ahead.  He is a good friend.

After the race I was hungry like I have never been hungry before.  I ate everything.  If it was someone else eating it would have been impressive how much was actually consumed but since it was me it was a little embarrassing.  I just couldn’t get un-hungry, if that’s a word, let alone full.  Today I am pretty sore but doing relatively well.  I don’t know if running races is addictive or if I am still a little delusional from yesterday but my wife and I have signed up for a 10K in September called Pints to Pasta.  I don’t think it will be fun but there will be beer at the end of that one so that should make things a bit more bearable.