Dodge Duck Dip Dive Dodge...

Note:  This is an old post.  The argument referenced in this post is LONG since gone.

I *hated* my Pierce College English teacher. If you ever come across someone there named Mrs. Tierney, please feel free to say I called her a tree-hugging hippy. Her emesis-inducing postulation that nature was infinitely wiser than humans made me grab for the nearest container. Truly a horrible way to start my college education. And yet, some of the things we read in Walden continue to stick with me, no matter how hard I try to beat it out of me. And here we go:

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation."

Some background: In High School youth group (High Impact at COTW), there was a LOT of pressure to fit kids into the ministry somehow. Those that made the decision were almost deified in the youth group. My gifts did not lend themselves to evangelism at all. The feeling was that if you were not planning on being a youth pastor or starting a church to convert the penguins, you were deficient in some fashion.

So, my sense of humor took a very attacking tone. I didn't know why at the time, but I was angry at everyone for making me feel excluded because I intended to be an engineer when they felt that anyone of any intellectual capacity should be going to LIFE, APU, etc.

In 10th grade, Rock Solid was asked to provide the Worship team at Camp Cedar Crest. While up there, I was very clearly directed to examine the hurt I was inflicting people with my pointed sense of humor.

After I returned, for a while, I had to humble myself, and actively seek out people I knew I had offended, and ask their forgiveness. It was a tough thing to do, but I discovered that I didn't want to be that person again.

My Senior year, while at another camp, for the only time in my life thus far, I honestly feel like I heard distinctly from God. It was a confirmation that I was not intended for the ministry at all. The release from bondage that I felt was so extreme that for the first time, I actually thought that God's plan for my life might include using the talents that he had given me.

This included my sense of humor. My earlier experience had shown me that using my outgoing sense of humor to hurt people is a path I never want to go down again. However, my experience Senior Year showed me that God gives us our personalities, desires, and strengths for a reason.

Fast Forward to about five years ago. I was new in town, and, as I've said in previous posts, the people here in Santa Barbara are very close-knit, and I was coming in as an outsider. My lack of social interaction caused me to literally go to bed crying myself to sleep some nights. I knew that I thrived on social interaction.

My former roommate Paul Laufer put it very succinctly, but I'll have to paraphrase: "Joe is, at all times, unabashedly Joe."

I love to include people.

I love to mix people from various facets of my life and see if anything gels.

I love saying what everyone is dying to, but can't bring themselves to say.

I love releasing the tension in a room by talking about what everyone is thinking about.

I love to make people laugh.

To that end, I've found that the best fit for my sense of humor and personality, besides being pointed at someone, is to bring the surreal and unexpected into a given situation. I imagine that strangers walk away from a chance encounter with me going "WTF was that?" Not in a bad way, mind you, just with a chuckle and a shake of the head.

And my fearlessness to be in a difficult social situation, whether at the center of attention, for bemusement/possible scorn, or to launch into the unknown, has served me well.

I've gotten up in meetings and asked difficult questions that everyone wanted to know, but were all too afraid to ask.

While working for the Navy, during a crowded lunch room during a three-day meeting, I asked if I could sit at a table with two gentleman I didn't recognize. My Team Lead informed me shortly after that the two gentlemen were the Program director for Land Attack (PMS 529) and a one-star admiral (to be fair, the admiral was in civilian clothes). We had a good lunch, despite my Team Lead sweating bullets three tables away. (He thought I was going to whip out my thoroughly tasteless Helen Keller Jokes.)

The Walden quote from above has gotten me thinking about marriages. It's been said that women enter into marriage hoping their men will change, whereas men enter into it hoping the women do not.

There is a very (unhealthy) stereotype in most churches that the women will eventually "domesticate" their partner, and mold their men into being more like them. This can be seen in various cute quips and jokes that go back and forth, remarking on the establishment of women as the puppet master of the husband.

For the most part, it is only humor.

However, there are those marriages where the husband, in his efforts to appease his wife, has given up all vestiges of having anything he finds interesting. The ironic part is, in most cases, the wife is still not happy with him;  now he's boring.

During a particularly dry point in my dating career, my good friends Jeff and Sarah loaned me a collection of pastor's take on the initiation and continued success of healthy marriages.

Surprisingly, it didn't contain the expected recurring theme of: "whatever the wife says goes." Most of them discussed the distinction between compromise versus collapse when it came to concessions when dealing with conflict; the need to provide the other person with boundaries to respect, as opposed to being a shapeless mass of goo. Being who you are, and yet supporting the other person.

I came to the realization that with my first girlfriend, in my eagerness to be supportive, I neglected to give her anything she could respect. My newfound realization to be true to who I was fit well with my earlier resistance to High Impact's pressure to force people into the ministry.

Let's go back a three and a half years ago. I was seeing this young lady, who, while a lovely girl, was exceedingly quiet.

Any conflict we had she would internalize, and she thought she should take any trampling of her personality as her burden to bear. I felt like I was dating someone that I could accidentally hurt to excess, and she would never let me know.

I came away from that relationship with a newfound respect for the verse "like iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another".

Not to say that she wasn't capable of it, but I doubted that I would ever be able to sharpen her without absolutely breaking her spirit, and I didn't think she would be able to correct me unless I made her so mad she couldn't see straight. It wasn't healthy.

This got me to thinking about the verse again, and how it might be likened to sparring partners (don't worry Petrie family, I'm not advocating any actual violence). But sparring partners are used to toughen up a competitor, but they are matched up by weight divisions.

You wouldn't take a heavyweight sparring partner and match them with a lightweight fighter.

In the same fashion, I know I need someone who can let me know when I've hurt them, and isn't afraid to tell me how they feel about it.

So why do we have all these disparate parts of my life in one post? Why post all this internal monologue concerning things that people could very well not care about?

Tabitha and I had a rough fight last night. It seemed small enough, but I didn't realize the full implications, or why it affected me so much until I had a chance to think about it.

The long and short of it had to deal with two situations in close proximity to each other. One of which I was being my loud self, and she tried to reel me in. The second dealt with a drive from LA to SB in which literally nothing was said.

I love being loud, happy, inviting, surreal, and sometimes embarrassing. It's who I am, and, unless I want to live a "life of quiet desperation", it's who I need to be.

I could quash that side of me, but that would leave her little to respect if the result of any argument was the removal of large sections of my personality. My experiences at High Impact showed me the importance of being myself, and the passive/aggressive nature that I exhibit when I'm being railroaded into something.

In the same light, I also don't want to quash her. I want to hear from her when she's upset. I want her to tell me when I've made her mad.

The entire car ride over, I was giving her the chance to speak when she was ready. I had told her what I thought, and didn't want to railroad the conversation.

Afterward, I realized I was still upset because I HAD wanted her to speak up. I had already told her how I felt, and I wanted her to feel confident and safe enough to let me know how she felt.

The whole reason I fell in love with Tabitha is because of her ability to tell an inappropriate joke. I love her confidence, I love her enthusiasm, I love her ability to point out when I've messed up, and to tell me how she feels. My frustration is in her reluctance to bring it out fully. My hope and desire is for her to feel safe enough to be able to express the amazing person she is with full confidence of my support in any situation.

I want to go through life together. I want her to be just as excited and confident about life as I hope to be. I want her to allow me to fuel her interests as much as she encourages me about mine. I want to be weird together. To have a passion and love of life that is infectious to all we touch.

The title of the post is a quote from the movie "Dodgeball". I include it because it because there is another quote that I think is relevant to this situation: "You gotta grab life by the haunches and hump it into submission!"

Peace beyond understanding

Tab is really unhappy with her job right now, and it is putting strain on things. She warned me when we where dating that when things got rough, she tended to bolt.

In fact, it was a point of amazement for her when we had our fight and she treated it as a speed bump in a longer road.

Yesterday, we had a tense conversation that dealt with Tab's frustrations, as detailed here.

However, this morning, in spite of all the issues, I found myself amazed that I am her husband, and loving her for who she is.

No resolution to her stress, or the issues surrounding it.

We haven't yet addressed the issue that brought this out.

Weird.

Pressure to perform...

Note:  This was made WAAAAAAAAAAY back in February, but I never felt I got it "just right".  So, in lieu of anything else, I'm just going to hit "publish post" and call it a day.  Enjoy.

Sooo, my girlfriend was happy Valetine's day. I got the opportunity to lie to her, and claim (genuine) exhaustion as a reason to not go out and do anything. And she loves me for it. :)

Unfortunately, for me, the memories are not quite so fond for this holiday...

Christmas was bittersweet with Carrie. She was so detached from investment into the relationship that it was as if she were not apart of it. I felt like a showpiece, almost "the flavor of the month".

Being a first Girlfriend, I went along with puppy-love abandon. Rather like Niles and Maris Crane on Frasier, I lacked a spine. By the time Valentine's Day rolled around, she had called a break to the relationship, from which it never recovered.

My second girlfriend, however, was so insecure about herself that by even Christmas, I didn't want to be with her.

In this year, however, things have changed. My last relationship was in 2000-2001. Since then, I have had a chance to grow and reflect on who I am both inside and outside of a relationship.

I've had opportunities with several young ladies since then, and have turned them down, recognizing the issues that would make the relationship unhealthy.

It was (unfortunately) a point of realized maturity (hate that word) when I turned a girl down, postulating that I would rather be in a healthy relationship then have someone to hug during V-Day.

Point being is that both relationships had major detractants when Valentine's Day came around.

This year, however, things were different. I finally had something of worth to give her. The best part was it took effort, not cash. And I knew it was going to be good.

Which is the weirdness. I've never had something I knew would be spot-on for someone without them telling me so, or finding out through someone else.

It made me really happy to do it.

It also gave me the confidence that I might have the ability to surprise her throughout her life. It's interesting to be happy to make someone happy, and look forward to doing it.

Re-Discovery...

What is it about a second look? When someone changes themselves only slightly, and you see them again and rediscover something you've known, but had completely forgotten?

The familiar suddenly becomes exciting again. Things you accepted at face value suddenly gain a dimension to them. Whether a passage of Scripture that you've read time and time again gaining a new freshness due to personal circumstances, or seeing someone in a different light because of a seemingly small change in yourself or them.

All this to say: Tab wore a skirt today. Wow. Just...wow.

Reminders of the past...

This past weekend, I had a chance to re-connect with an old friend from High School that I haven't seen in 15 years, save a brief howdie in 1999.

Jason and I literally kept talking until 1:45 in the morning. Talking with him, I began to miss those days, and I couldn't figure it out. On the drive home, it hit me: It was the friendships.

There is something about being in a large cluster of friends everyday without much in the way of formality.

I remember being in a large group of friends in High school group, Jr. High, going to Camp Cedar Crest and hanging out, being crazy, and being free to be goofy with one another.

Dating usually meant you brought someone into your group of friends.

Nobody was really really dating seriously at that time (get real people), so the concept of isolation from one's friends because of a dating relationship was usually a sign of a high maintenance relationship that wasn't going to last summer or college separation.

Talking to Jason, I began to realize that the way he included people was the formation of my current desire to include people in everything I do.

But, most importantly, some of the pain of my arrival to Santa Barbara began to come into focus.

The part I miss most from High School times is the lack of pretense in relationships. The ability to simply be one's self around other people, and not put up an act to keep people from possibly being uncomfortable with so much personal knowledge of each other; Being transparent to friends you could trust implicitly, because you hadn't learned, or needed, to put up guards.

Every year for the past few years, I make a trek up to Stanford around Christmas-time to visit another old friend. I look forward to it all year, but it has always been more than just a chance to unwind. Talking with Jason, the reason became clear: I could be myself. This other friend (now married to a lovely young lady, equally as friendly) is much the same. There is no need to hide, put up barriers, etc. This is someone with whom I can be my silly, goofy self with, and there hasn't been a need to keep them at arm's length. I can be silly, goofy, and vulnerable without having to worry about being hurt.

At a wedding yesterday with Tab, I realized the extent that I had emotionally not allowed her words and actions to affect me, keeping her at arm's reach internally, despite her earnestly seeking me out. Interacting with her at the reception, now armed with this renaissance viewpoint, I think I fell in love with her a little more. I could be in real trouble here. :)

Side note: In talking with Jason I found out I unwittingly embarrassed him at a High School outing in front of a girl he was very interested in at the time. Evidently, it was so thorough that he didn't stand a chance. He can finally laugh about it now. I had no idea. Oops.