young love

today, while driving in the reconstruct expedition, a pertinent song from my past bellowed through the spacious interior. it is safe to say that my fearless vocal performance was less than perfect. i was, indeed, a bit pitchy.

the song, since you're probably wondering, was foreigner's "i want to know what love is." the vocal range of this song takes me a bit past my comfort zone, a comfort zone i'll leave only for songs that lead me into wistful joy.

this song just happens to be the first and only "song" i've ever had in a relationship. in seventh grade (the beginning of the two-year period of my life which i classify as my 'prime') i was dating the head cheerleader, whitney wiggins. i must also mention that she was in eighth grade at the time, an older woman. as the song ended, it made me quite happy that i have moved beyond the awkwardness of my early relationships and into a new awkwardness which has been at the forefront of every relationship since.

the irony of it all is that i'm still not sure i know what love actually is. perhaps listening to cheesy power ballads will help speed that along. bands like journey and boston will be my new teachers as i search for it. i will learn of love as i sing in falsetto with frizzy haired men from the past.

cleansing

the other day i was told by two people that they were tired of reading that i stunk. the only purpose of this post is to declare myself clean and smelling delightfully like the springs of ireland.

i smell much like garbage

today i left my house at 8:45 am to begin work. it is now 4 am exactly and i just got home (i haven't even showered yet).

in my exhaustion, i've had the most profound thoughts of my life. the sad thing is that the only thing i can remember is that the thoughts i've had are profound.

taargus. taargus.

this evening i stopped by target on my way home. when i came out to my car, i found a note under my windshield wiper. at first, i assumed somebody had hit my car. this was not the case. i soon discovered some interesting news. the note read as follows:

"your wife's new legal name is Taargus. Taargus."

needless to say, i was both shocked and relieved. it lead me to some serious metaphysical questioning, due in large part that i am now and have always been without wife.

i could not stop my mind from entertaining the crazy ideas that went through my head on the lovely drive home. i could assume that somebody was having fun with me as part of some grassroots movement many hip youth are involved with- which is most likely the case- but i would rather believe that it was intended for a real person and mistakenly given to me. either way, i am happy to have received it.

there are two things which make me appreciate this note. the first is the fact that my wife has a new legal name of which i am unaware and the idea that this news would have been delivered in anonymity via a note under the wiper of a car.

the second thing is that they felt the need to repeat the last name. taargus. taargus. undoubtedly written so as to promote perfect clarity. they wanted it to sink in and they wanted me to know that this was indeed her new legal name.

for much of the ride home, i found myself repeating that name: taargus, taargus, taargus and so on and so forth. i began to believe it to be true. i couldn't help but ask myself why she couldn't just tell me she had a new name. i can only assume it is a new marriage that brought about this change. i would have liked to hear it from her. i feel she owes me that. did our marriage mean nothing? taargus......... taargus. i would have been fine with it. i'm learning to live without her. taargus............ i guess it really is over. this confirms it. she's moved on. and i'm in the same place. taargus..... taargus. at any rate, i'm happy for her. i guess. she's living her life. that's all any of us can do. taargus, just what kind of name is taargus?

curiosity is strong in me. i googled taargus. my findings were strange, disconcerting and involved myspace (a place i do not tread often and for good reason). i believe that name might be uzbeki.

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there is no future

over the last few months and weeks this blog has been moving forward at a very sad and dismal pace. for that i apologize. i've come to the point where i know i must either hang it up or change my approach to it.

when i started this endeavor back in january of 2006, my intentions were to keep people informed about my time in moldova. it served that purpose well and began to serve other purposes i hadn't intended, such as giving me an outlet to discuss cereal eating techniques/methods, saved by the bell, michael bolton and also serving as something i could discuss the amazing joys and even more amazing struggles that come in the service of the God that sits on the throne of grace.

admittedly, i've lost a great deal of motivation to keep posting random ideas, randomly. i've pondered, lately, why that has been. tonight, with the help of martin buber's i and Thou and a couple of conversations i've had with jay strother, i feel like i've come to a bit of a conclusion.

i've been caught up with the future. what am i going to do next? what is the next step in the service of Christ's church? these are the questions i've been asking. these are the questions i've been asked.... a lot.

they are good and fair questions. i am not arguing with that. but i've been wrapped up in them. i've been captivated by them, hounded by them, frustrated with them (or by my lack of an answer to them) and i've grown tired of them. but again, they are good and fair questions.

it just dawned on me with abnormal simplicity and clarity tonight that the future rarely if ever teaches us. actually, let me restate this: the future doesn't teach us anything. to a degree, the future doesn't even exist-only in the promises of God.

my friend, houston, enjoys proclaiming the non-existence of potential energy. i enjoy bringing it up and find myself agreeing. physicists will debate us and use facts, data and what have you but we use passion- something i find to be a great deal more convincing.

i'm starting to throw the future into that same boat. the future doesn't exist unless it is happening (which makes it the present) or until it has happened (which makes it the past). it is a constant hypothetical, a mere possibility - if back to the future II taught us anything, it taught us this.
this unsupported argument should explain the title of this post and hopefully let you know that it is not a cry for help or a declaration of the hopelessness in the wasteland in which we live.

no, instead this is a plea. it is a plea to myself most of all, a plea to get out of the nonexistent future. it's a plea to get out of our five-year plans. it's a plea to get out of our fears of future failures or even successes.

it is a plea to meet God right now, right here or there (as you sit reading this). we spend too much time worrying about tomorrow, about what we will eat or wear (mt 6). God calls us to the present, to live for his purposes now. the past is gone and the future is only a philiosophical concept.

however, we do have a future, a glorious future, rather, inheritance. but in the paraphrased words of stanley grenz (possibly): 'let us live our lives now as we will one day become.' that hope is stored up and hidden in Christ for us (I peter 1, colossians 3). the kingdom of God is in the here and now as well as the eternal.

and it is in light of that i strive to live.

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i am going to continue this blog. but it is going to change. it has lacked purpose for a while. i am going to try to write something more in the vain of little essays. i need something to hold me accountable to productive and challenging thought. i have yet to determine what the regularity of it will be. i'd like to do at least two a month but have no set schedule as of now. what i do not want to do is what i've been doing lately: just posting something random so i don't have a bagel in the monthly archive.

thank you for reading and also to those of you who have commented both on this blog and in person about it. i hope this renewed vigor will prove mutually helpful. Godspeed

lost

as my blog slowly moves into a seldom-used keeper of random and mostly obscure thoughts, i decided i would write about the one television show i make a point of viewing: Lost. i will preface this post by declaring that i am long past the stage of trying to figure out what is going on. i have become purely an observer. i do not theorize, i do not make detailed charts and graphs about the show and i do not feel the pressure to do so. i will say this: it isn't pergatory. please stop telling me it is.

well, this week's episode was outstanding. this week was also the first week that i almost didn't get to see it.

i am working with reconstruct this summer http://reconstruct.org/ and this past week we had a group from seattle. i was staying with them at brentwood baptist. yeah, i slept in the church. it was a bit strange, especially walking to the shower with a towel, my little bathroom tote and flip flops. i felt a little like mr. belding when he and becky had fallen into a little rough patch and slater found him in the bathroom while mr. b was living at bayside.

the week was fantastic. but as it went on, i feared that i might not be able to watch lost. luckily the group went to a farm or something wednesday and didn't come back till after the show was over. that is most of them didn't come back until the show was over.

in the middle of the show, i got a call from one of the group's leaders telling me two of the guys were outside of the church and that i needed to let them in. so i waited until a commercial break and sprinted from dennis worley's office (a big thank you to mr. worley for letting me watch it in his office), to door 11 to let the kids in. i shook hands with their parents had them say their goodbye's and then made them sprint with me back to dennis' office.

we made it without missing a word of dialogue. but it turned out that they had never seen the show. so the next commercial break, i explained- in as much detail as was necessary- the entire plots of season 1, season 2 and got them current on season 3 with a little bit of character plots thrown in for good measure. i felt like the micro-machines guy explaining it.

this event really heightened my enjoyment of the episode not to mention the fact that there were so many answers given and the bonus of the last minute's punch to the gut.

truthfully, i wouldn't mind this show enjoying the type of run that friends or seinfielf or even the simpsons have enjoyed.

happy birthday mom

today i witnessed a man with a shaved-bald head wearing a hairnet.

it did not seem needed.

i'm fairly certain it was required of the law since he was in a bakery (working, he wasn't a patron). it stuck with me for a while. i suppose the reason for that is daylight saving time.

i'd like to go on the record as saying that i oppose daylight saving. daylight should be lost like so many keys, remotes & common men's dignity.

if history serves me right, i believe it was benjamin franklin who thought this deplorable ritual. although that man did much for his fellow man- bifocals, flexible catheters, the glass harmonica & the studies of refrigeration, electricity and, of course, kite flying- i feel that he could of refrained from ever mentioning daylight saving.

now don't get me wrong, i do enjoy falling back. why wouldn't i? but springing forward is of the devil. if the good people of the world would like to enjoy the sun longer, let them get up earlier. just don't disturb my sleeping habits. also, don't make me late for things, or uncomfortably early. and most of all, don't make me attempt to change my various clocks and watches, especially the watches.

we're told, by the 'experts,' that daylight savings saves electricity. more and more each day, i trust experts less. this brings me back to my first observation. somewhere there is an expert or even experts who decided that hair nets would prevent unwanted hair from infiltrating all types of foods, including pastries and the like. this is true. but they go to far and mandate that all people working in the bakery must wear hairnets. thus this man is forced to wear a hair net over his hairless head. there is no reason that this man should be wearing this thing.

unless of couse he likes the hairnet. which is what i'm saying about daylight saving time.

daylight saving time is just fine. but it shouldn't be forced upon us all, only those with hair in the food preperation business who like to enjoy as much sun as they can while cutting back on their usage of electricity.

why don't we just take off or put on, from the actual time, 30 minutes and leave it alone.

a month and change

for some reason i have become a binge/purge writer. i fear this to be a character trait since i have long carried this habit as a reader.

i have also noticed that i am particularly fickle in the area of my facial hair. it seems i cannot commit to any one form of whiskery. this could be in part to my portly state of being. without fail, the removal of my beard (as it did just this week) will lead me to wonder at my small collection of chins, a collection which now leads me to believe that not having a beard will eventually lead me to a thinner and ultimately healthier lifestyle due to the unpleasantness that accompanies any gaze at my reflection. i hope this to be a hypothesis which will prove itself true.

now, there is a reason i'm writing this evening. yes, there was some inspiration, a muse that begat this post. that muse be chuck klosterman and his book of deconstructive pop-culture prose, sex, drugs & cocoa puffs. in this book of essays, klosterman analyzes subject matter that ranges from billy joel's artistic merit to the importance of saved by the bell (an obvious reason for my initial attraction to it).

i am aware that most of the people who will read this (most being about 4 out of the 5 to 7 people who do read this from time to time) started reading this because i was living in moldova doing mission work and might be surprised that i would read a book with 'sex' & 'drugs' in the title. i will also say that if this book was rated using the movie rating system we all seem to be familiar with, it would be rated 'R' for language mostly (outside of that it is pretty much pg-13). that being said, i really enjoyed reading it.

klosterman managed to give meaning to seemingly meaningless topics. at the very least he tried to thoughtfully look at things we mostly thoughtlessly ingest. as a christian, i even found some of his insights to be quite pertinent to my spiritual life and thought that the church could benefit from some of his observations. in fact, had some scripture been thrown in, the language and more risky subject matter been toned down, and of course some simple faith revelations been inserted, this book would be something hip & 'emergent' christians would proudly display on both their bookshelves and tables at the starbucks in which they are reading it (right next to their copies of 'velvet elvis' and anything written by donald miller. yes, it is that type of book, a quasi-pomo (almost postmodern if you prefer) work that is quite engaging but makes things much more important than they probably are.

perhaps, that is why i enjoyed it. i am either in a place where i am making things much more important than they are or not making things important enough. either way i have felt somewhat disengaged with the world around me as of late. i don't quite feel connected to anything, or for that matter, anybody at this time. i don't mean this to sound as if i'm depressed. i'm not. i just feel disconnected.

there is a great part of me that would like to blame this on my time in moldova. i don't mean blame here in a negative sense. i simply mean it in the sense of causation. it has been over 5 months that i've been home. i'm not sure that i did a good job re-entering the world i'm currently in. there is a sense of liminality in my life right now. it can feel as though i'm not really anywhere. i'm just living.

but i can't just live. that will kill me.

i need to be engaged in something, be challenged by something, be something. it has been very hard to be passionate about anything. i hate that.

there is a good part of me that fears that life could become that and that i could just become the type of person who never looks beyond surface of anything i see. perhaps i am envying that characteristic of klosterman. the things we all consider mundane, he looks at with an earnest desire for meaning.

i remember somebody telling me that somebody like john piper, if not him, said something to the effects of this: if you can't see God's glory in a morning cup of orange juice, then you're missing it entirely. i suppose that's true to some extent. but i feel like the reason that has stuck with me is because i can't.

i really have trouble with that. orange juice comes from oranges from a tree from the soil of the earth God created in a incredibly divine and holy moment. and i suppose that the creation of that agricultural system of progression, in God's providence, speaks of His great love and omniscience in a way that is profoundly spiritual and moving. i'm sure there is beauty in that. i just seem to notice the level of pulp, whether it be too much or too little.

perhaps that is why i feel disconnected: because i look at cup of orange juice and see pulp and the certain unpleasantness that comes with it after i've brushed my teeth.

i'm just tired of it. i'm tired of feeling so garbled and scattered. i'm thankful for the growth and learning i've had over the last year or two. i just want to live life more richly, more abundantly, with less of a gut and as soon as possible.

What?!

my grandmother, nana, has been staying with us over the holiday season. more so than most years, nana has become hard of hearing. this has made for fun times.

just now, as i was checking the weather reports and my dad was eating lunch in the kitchen, one such time occurred. it went something like the following:

(phone rings, dad is at the table & nana close by)

dad: hello this is bill (to the caller)
nana: bill, is that you?
dad: yes (to the caller)
nana: yes bill, what is it?
dad: (continues on with business conversation)
nana: what?! oh.

this conversation is a very standard kind of thing. it is also interesting how easily and inevitably i scare her. when i come up the stairs, regardless of how quietly or loudly i do so, she will be very startled, proceeding to tell me that i "scared the s#%t out of her." according to my unofficial calculations, i've scared this material out of her close to 24 times in only a few weeks (a personal best).

also, i feel it important to say that i started this year off in manly fashion. on new years day i chopped wood, started a fire, and sounded a barbaric yawp throughout the wilderness (the roofs of the world were far away). i'm a lumberjack and i'm okay.

Christmas

an original paint production by twbedi.
(note: artwork is not to scale)

yurt wanted

those of you that spend much time with me have probably heard me speak of the glorious yurt. for those of you who have never heard of a yurt, congratulations, life is about to get better.

yurts are a dwelling typically used in central asia, which the picture above shows, not to mention a goat-lady who got back. note that this lady has dropped as if it were hot. the yurts easy transportability made it ideal for the nomadic lifestyle of many inhabitants of countries like mongolia, russia and siberia.

they would be made of rods, covered in felt and could be carried by cart. passed from generation to generation, the shangrak, or center ring, would show the heritage of the family. walls would be made from lattice or some type of collaspable wall.
the dwellings are suprisingly well engineered and are used in some of the most extreme weather conditions on God's green earth, from deserts to polar tundras. i would say that it would be safe to call them architecture's thermos. the yurt of the past, though still in use in some cultures, is becoming popular again today. i believe that is because 'yurt' is fun to say and also, in large part, due to this guys hat.

he also has excellent facial hair. that is actually my great great uncle, svetozar bjelica bedi. i'm told we have the same laugh. old toz, as his friends called him, loved a good joke. i also, unfortunately, inherited his child-bearing hips.

i digress.

as i was saying, the yurt is becoming popular and modernized. because they are affordable, semi-permanent, versatile and highly adaptable, people around the world are beginning to utililze architecture's thermos, the yurt. now a days, yurts are made with high-tech materials and becoming very modern. they are used as vaction homes, art studios, for businesses, camping and many other things. the unique interiors can be finished out as any home would be. some examples:

needless to say, i love yurts. it is my hopes to one day have a yurt. i would like it to serve as perhaps a pottery studio, workshop or even a study. i would also like to start a cult. perhaps the greatest potential of the yurt could be filling the cult housing niche. they seem like perfect dwellings for a strange commune with crazy, rather, misunderstood ideas and views.

if you'd like to learn more about yurts, or price them, please do:

http://www.yurt.com

http://www.coloradoyurt.com/

http://www.rainieryurts.com/

or you could purchase yourself or someone you love this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Yurts-Living-Round-Becky-Kemery/dp/1586858912/sr=8-2/qid=1166592997/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/102-2274086-8156910?ie=UTF8&s=books

respect the como

i spent yesterday evening visiting targets and listening to perry como sing ave maria. the perry como christmas album forces christmas cheer upon all those who are unsuspecting. look at that cover and tell me you wouldn't go for a cup of egg nog and a little debbie christmas tree or whatever christmas treet your taste buds enjoy. i long to have my head pictured on a such a beautiful reef but that goes without saying.

i enjoy the como. perhaps it's just his name: perry como. the name 'perry como' just makes me think of happy. it's the name of somebody you'd like to have on your side, not in a fight or anything like that, just in life.

as i mentioned earlier, perry and i went to targets. we went to targets because until saturday they are selling the firefly series dvd (quick pause to thank seth worley for his firefly passion) for 18.99$ and it is normally 39.99$. those are the kind of savings with which i can get on board, you'd better believe it. the only problem was that it was not in stock at any target in the world.

this did trouble me because i'm cheap and probably wouldn't buy it at full price. then i found that i could get a rain check on the price for 45 days. my heart sang for joy and the late perry como sang right along (his music will never die). all i had to do was take a slip of paper to the register, have the person scan it and then a receipt would print allowing me to buy the product beyond the sale date at the sale price. bravo target. job well done. now i don't have to worry. i will have the extra 20$ to blow on whatever i want, like perry como's greatest hits.

perry como

1912-2001

singer of songs, friend of birds

for more info on perry como http://www.perrycomo.net/