Giving Thanks...

Man is wired to be ungrateful...
Our natural tendency is to consider first and foremost the "burden" we are forced to bear, and the joy we are being "denied." God bless a holiday that reminds us to consider and REMEMBER that things are pretty good. Here is my hodge podge of gratefulness:

If the world was a village of one hundred people... I would be the most well off in the village.... (because I have food, sanitation, and an education)... thats a hard one to blow off...

I won't be experiencing one of the highlights of my year this November: Thanksgiving in Sun Valley with family... but I also won't have to make a middle of the night, white knuckle, nine hour drive either...

I live in a comfortable house in a quite and safe neighborhood.

My trip to work is approximately 12 minutes

My wife puts up with all sorts of my garbage

My wife enjoys making unbelievably delicious food

I have a job that provides my family a sustainable income and health insurance

I am healthy in every critical way

God blessed me with a sense of self at a very young and critical age, which may very well have saved my life through teenage years fraught with insecurity and distraction

I have two parents who made outstanding efforts to love and guide me. Its amazing how this becomes so much clearer as you mature.

I have Public Television which is a saving grace in modern media (2 OPB stations now)

I have the rare CONVENIENCE of being able to worry about things other than safety, food and shelter.

I recently received a forward with a long list of advice from a 93 year old... it fits in well with all of this. Here are my favorites:
Life is too short to waste time hating anyone...
Your job won't take care of you when you are sick. Your friends and parents will. Stay in touch.
Its better to be kind than right
Cry with someone. It's more healing than crying alone.
It's OK to get angry with God. He can take it.
Don't compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about.
Over prepare, then go with the flow.
No one is in charge of your happiness but you.
Frame every so-called disaster with these words. 'In five years, will this matter?'
What other people think of you is none of your business.
Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.
If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else's, we'd grab ours back.
Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.
The best is yet to come.
Yield.

Happy Thanksgiving

Jake

Quak!....Quack?!

Due to the selfless generosity of our dear friends the Stockdales, Annie and I were able to enjoy some last second Oregon Duck football! It was frigid, but a lot of fun! The Ducks handily beat Arizona State (although they allowed some nonsense in the third quarter that made everyone a little less at ease).
Perhaps my favorite part was attending my first night game. It was the first time I have looked at tailgaters and thought something other than "really you guys? This is where you want to be right now? Doing this? The night-time atmosphere seemed more like a huge encampment of the Macedonian army. Lots of fires, separate parties.. the vibe was much cooler.
It was a great date night... including dark and scary bike rides to and from Autzen. Anyway No complaints.

What a great time. Thanks Dave and Teresa!

Jake

...Same Old.. (Continued)

Five more Minutes

I would like to add five minutes to a lot of things. I would like to add five minutes of sleep after my alarm goes off. I would love to add five more minutes to my life, five more minutes to my lunch period, five more minutes for eating food, five more minutes on a long distance call, five more minutes to say what I need to say, five more minutes of peace and quit, five more minutes before I go to work, five more minutes of Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like I Do,” five more minutes of having my back scratched, feet massaged, and head itched. Five more minutes in the pool, five more minutes with my niece, and five more minutes until the land mine explodes.

Things you can buy for 50 cents
1. If your lucky, a fantastic record at DI
2. Any 8-track (maybe two) at DI
3. Actually most things at DI
4. A packages of tacks
5. A pop
6. Not much of anything in Alacart line anymore (school lunch)
7. Favors from younger siblings
8. Two huge ice cream cones in the gas station at the end of Trappers Loop
9. One doughnut…WHAT A RIP!!

If my mirror could talk
What are you looking at? Are you really going to wear that? You know I am sick of looking at you, you make me sick, flicking your toothbrush juice at me because you think its so entertaining how the water sprays all over me. That just great… oh and the zit popping …terrific! How about the weird organic materials growing all over me… have you looked at my lower right corner? Have you? Whose gonna clean that up? Not you apparently… oh and then you leave me in the dark all day, I cant see a dang thing… mirrors need light to reflect einstien! Who am I supposed to talk to huh? The sink?! Yeah well I’m sick of it, you go and take a shower every morning, you fog everything up, I can’t breath, I can’t see. You need to do some reflecting of your own wise guy.

Fictional Place
My name is Zarko. From the planet Merkutsio. I am writing to you from the colonial province known to Merkutcites as Vietnam. I am lying in a pile of my own vomit. Why, you ask? Well that information will be released to you at an undisclosed time, considering you cooperate with my requests. If not I will be forced to take each of your bottom lips and pull them up over your heads, which may seem impossible to your feeble human minds but has proven possible through extensive Merkutsian research. Anyway, here’s the deal- Grant me political asylum or die…. Oh did I mention that I am in a pile of my own vomit.

Ingredients for Happy Life
1. Food
2. Folks
3. Fun
4. Time to love
5. Time to hate
6. A time for peace… I swear its not too late
7. Things to believe in
8. Music
9. Peace of Mind

Best Lookin:
1. Nancy Wilson (Heart)
2. Cindy Crawford
3. Kathy Ireland (What ever happened to her?)
4. Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman
5. Stevie Nicks

Same Old...

Tonight I re-stumbled into an old composition notebook of mine from a creative writing class my Junior year in high school 95-96. I remember reading through this with Annie once. Her take home form the experience was that I have not changed much since I was in high school.... I still am not sure how to take that. I know I have changed, but there are parts of that book, that sort of strike a chord of utter "jakeness." Its sort of a reminder of what it means to be a Jake. Here are some samples:


10 words I don't like: 1)tizzy 2)orb 3)vomit 4)putrid 5)begat 6)zit 7)chunk
10 words I like: 1)fuzz 2)Guadalupe 3)Larva 4)Garbanzo 5)fjord 6)lather 7)funkadelic

10 things that annoy me:
1)People who think all that John Denver sings about is drugs
2)Really intense fragrances
3)People who think the Moody Blues music is too weird
4)People who try to talk me into doing things I dont want to do
5)People who don't know the difference between the 60s and the 70s
6)People who play their music really loud in campgrounds
7)Mean people
8)Women's rights freaks (I was tempted to sensor myself... but that seems unauthentic)
9)Tangled fishing line
10)People who hit you as a form of greeting

Things I believe in:
1) GOD
2) Repentance
3) John Denver
4) Democracy
5) My parents
6) Phonographs
7) The old fashioned way of doing things
8) The Christmas spirit

Things I regret:
1) Not taking AP Biology
2) Only being able to live 6 months in the seventies
3) Having been a fan of the New Kids on the Block when they first became popluar
4) Having not tried in the 6th and 7th grade
5) Not playing little league baseball
6) Not recording every episode of the Muppets when they were on regular television
7) All the bad stuff I have done

"Painful"
1) Flipping over your handlebars and landing on your face
2) People making fun of John Denver
3) Having your legs tied to two separate horses and having them run in opposite directions
4) eating tomatoes
5) Braces
6) Having your eye poked with a sharp objects
7) Burning alive
8) Deep frying your arm
9) Passing a kidney stone

"Hell"

Hell for me?... Wow. Hell for me wouldn't be a place without milk, it wouldn't be a place with some horned demon with a pitch fork. It would be a humid room, that I always have to wear a snowsuit in. I would have constant indigestion and sometimes diarrhea, but I would never be able to take the snowsuit off, so I would have to.... Something like TOOL or SEPULTURA or rap would be playing loud and nonstop. There would be people all around me having never ending banana eating contests. There would be lice infested rats all over the ground. Ooh, and everyone would be slapping me on the back and making fun of John Denver.

To do before I die:
1) Visit every National Park in the US
2) Get Married
3) Have kids
4) Become a forester of Geologist
5) Figure out Algebra and how it applies to anything
6) Fly in a commercial airplane
7) Graduate form college
8) Go to Europe
9) Have HUGE TRACKS OF LAND


Hardest thing I ever did:
The hardest thing I ever had to do was finish a plate of this ricey, cheesy, spicy dinner my mom made about 10 years ago. I couldn't leave the table until I had finished. It was the most awful tasting stuff in the world, and I had a mountain of it because I thought it was going to be delicious. My brothers and sisters had left and were watching America's Funniest Home videos downstairs. But I was stuck till I finished. Well I finished, about an hour later having spent most of the time between bites psyching myself up for the next mouthful of Japanese concentration camp food. I would gag, plug my nose, close my eyes and force the food down with all my might. When I was done I was offered a piece of cake, but I had been too traumatized to think of anything else to eat.

(Sorry Mom... I bet I would love it now)


There is more great stuff... maybe I will share some later


Jake

Who knows where the time goes..

Sometimes it is challenging to accept that you have a one way ticket on the escalator of time and space. Everyone else is there with you. As you get older you seem to become more aware of this reality. Perhaps that is because when we are young we are so eager to get to the next day, next week, next birthday! Things change. I have started to understand, in the slightest degree, the way our grandparents and even parents feel about days gone by, "the way things used to be." I am too young to be having "the way things used to be" moments, and yet I find myself in conversations about strange devices called floppy disks, or watching a 12 year old on the bus look at a man's portable CD player like it was from outer space, or looking back at music or TV shows from my youth that I thought were so hip but now appear unmistakably cheesy. One example however that stands out in my mind is the impact of progress on areas where I had a real sense of place.

When I was in my very early teens my friend Trent Johnson and I would go rabbit hunting out near Cedar Fort, Utah (west of Lehi). Trent was more of a hunting enthusiast than I (when his Dad went hunting, he had every intention of actually getting a deer... I discovered after years of hunting with MY dad and uncles that the worst possible thing that could happen on their deer hunt is that someone would shoot (and have to deal with) a dead deer). Trent and I had taken hunter safety together and viewed ourselves as skilled outdoorsman. We were, however, skilled outdoorsman who had to have our mom's drive us out to our hunting grounds. Once you left Lehi or, Bluffdale, this area was pretty much the sticks. We really developed a connection with a specific area and loved our Saturday afternoons out there. We rarely killed anything, but always had fun.
Years later I asked a girl from school(USU) out. It was summer time and she was staying with family in Utah Valley. She gave me directions and I agreed to pick her up. As I followed the directions I realized that I was generally heading towards my old hunting grounds. She mentioned that the relatives she was staying with were a young family. It seemed strange that they would be on a farm out there. As I followed the road out towards Cedar Fort I started doubting the directions... I must have taken a wrong turn...this cant be right. Then suddenly I noticed a newer looking apartment complex... then another... then a subdivision, then three subdivisions!!!! It was like discovering a whole new civilization... like Will Smith in Independence Day.. I was flabbergasted. It was utterly astounded how quickly this area, that I would have guessed would remain undeveloped for decades to come, had become quite literally a city in a matter of a few years.

Time indeed marches on. I think of Annie's grandmother who is 95. She has watched the Wasatch Front go from being a few larger towns with satellite villages into an endless fabric of cities and suburbs. For better or worse, it is part of what happens here on earth. We learn, we relearn, we adjust, we adapt... and yes, amid all of the convenience and progress, we even yearn for what we've lost.... except for floppy disks....

Heppy Halloveen

I know Halloween gets some bad press, and it is sort of a weird holiday to explain, justify, or responsibly relate to. Yet I feel a warm fuzzy when I think of Halloween. It isn't a Christmas or Thanksgiving fuzzy... but its not far off. Maybe it is just the celebration of this time of year, which is a stellar season. I wont say it has nothing to do with goblins or ghouls... because in a way.. it does (although more of a Charlie Brown version of goblins than a Nightmare on Elm Street version.

Recently Annie and I attended some Halloween parties. We have sort of lamed out on dressing up for Halloween the last few years. This year we thought we needed to at least make an effort. Still we weren't interested in spending much money. We figured we would approach the process organically and went to our favorite thrift store with an open mind. the idea soon developed that we could take an exercise theme. We decided that "awkward" needed to be incorporated, (especially after finding me some uncomfortably short running shorts--and I don't mean uncomfortable for me). After finding Annie a random speed skating suit from Australia, it was sealed--- our theme would simply be: "really awkward exercise couple" the guiding question was: "If you were walking your dog in the park, and a couple jogged past you... what would it take to for that to be the most awkwardly amusing experience it could be?" We tried to achieve this within reason.



I also thought it had been too long since we posted a Moby update. This is a pic of him fully aware of how much trouble he was in after getting into the garbage (it is hard to stay mad at something so cute).

A Mystery... Once Again...

Read about this this morning. Apparently experts have been able to prove beyond doubt that the skeleton found earlier this year in the desert of southern Utah was NOT that of Everett Ruess's. Apparently there was some jumping to conclusions, and some mistakes made on the DNA side of things. So you decide, is it better news that Everett's Story remains a mystery? or is it sad that we have been robbed of some answers.... I like the mystery... maybe I still have a chance of stumbling into his remains or belongings in the wildlands of southeastern Utah!!

Here is the article, enjoy:

http://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=148&sid=8397489