Engaging Times

"When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible."  -Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally

Recently, my brother Abram got engaged to his girlfriend Ashley.  This was exciting news for the entire family. That is a pivotal step in life which I think would scary and exciting at the same time.   It has been great getting to know Ashley and it is wonderful seeing how happy they make each other.  I look forward to having her in the family.  I'm sure they have quite the year ahead of them planning for such a big event.  Life is always changing and it is great when those changes make life even better.

A lot of love stories seem to be hitting their zenith as of late.  In early August, I'll be attending my friend Sam's wedding in San Diego, CA.  You will probably be getting a full account of my trip to what I imagine to be the perfect city to live in.  I've known Sam since we were young kids on Bus 4 and to watch him getting married shows how far we have all come.  I have yet to meet his fiance which makes sense since I usually hang out with Sam about once every year or two. This I am looking forward to as well as she seems like such a cool person from what I have heard.  Then approaching in November, my cousin Rino and Jess are going to be getting married here in Austin.  I tell you, I'm starting to get really good at weddings, bridesmaids beware.  Since the entire family will be there, it also doubles as a family reunion of sorts which is nice and adds that level of excitement.  I might even have to take a day off of work to recover from that one.

The summer has been a somewhat quiet one for me.  My parents came to visit and my father built/extended my fence to include a dog run and give my backyard more space.  I was very impressed with how it turned out and did not prove to be much help.  It makes me happy that my family feels at home at my place and my mom really helped me decorate a bit and added a few plants which probably need watering now that she is gone.  My dad also brought back my dog Max who he had been taking care of for a while.  Max is a great dog, but man he is a digger.  We had to put up an electric fence to deter him at our old place.  Now him and Chloe are a digging father-daughter team, but have only engineered a few break outs thus far.  They get out, roam a bit and then come back home.  I do understand that digging is a reflection on my ownership, so I'm trying to spend more time with him so that he can burn off some of that energy.  There has not been any more sailing this summer like I imagined and I probably need to finish setting up my office and mounting my TVs around the house.  My garage is still a mess, but for now I'm just enjoying being in my home.

My younger sister Eliza, her husband Gil and their kids Tori and Celeste came to visit Austin this summer as well. Celeste seems to grow by leaps and bounds each time I see her and now that she is 3, she is a little person, which makes her more fun to interact with.  She is adorable and I don't throw out that praise generously.  Eliza got to finally meet Ashley after the great news.  It was very hot that weekend, so we didn't do the usual Austin things I like to do for guests, but next time they come, I'll be sure to make it up to them.  I also need to work on having things to do other than those that involve drinking.  I am reminded that bars are not a good place for kids.

I got to see Harry Potter 7.2 this past weekend.  That was a lot of movies and a lot of books in coming, yet all totally worth it. Emma Watson was spectacular, but my opinion on that is probably a bit biased.  I went with my friend Rebecca to a really nice theater that had couches and waiters.  It was the right way to do such an event.  Rebecca had never seen Harry Potter before, so why not just save the best for last.  I made a mistake on watching it in 3D, I'm starting to think that I don't really care for 3D much anymore, but that is another topic.

I want to start running again like I was in the spring, but I know that the day I go outside for a quick jog, all my progress on distance and stamina will be gone and I'll be starting all over.  I also know that this means a lifetime of running ahead, which makes a simple jog seem that much more daunting of a task.  Makes it easy to put off for just one more day.  Funny how your mind is great at playing tricks on you, I mean I have completely given up fighting it in the morning when it is time to get up.  I utilize a crazy chain of alarms that increase in urgency and yet my mind still wants to go back to bed, even if I've had a good nights sleep.  I wonder how much time I spend on battles with myself.  I'm slowly pulling ahead, but the clock is always ticking.

how do you know?

No Where But Up

"There's no mystical energy field that controls my destiny" - Han Solo

My entire life I have heard people say, "Everything happens for a reason," despite how demonstrably untrue that statement proves to be.  It feels great to think that and I'd love to believe it, but it doesn't take long to think about all the flaws in that belief.  The key really comes down to the meaning of the word "reason."  If you give it a metaphysical meaning, something only a god can understand, well why are we even having this discussion then? But if you give it meaning of "greater good," it ceases to make sense. The cliche seems to assume that everyone gets a happy ending and everything that happens to us along the way are just lessons or twists of fate to get us to some final positive destination.  But how many people really end up at that final positive destination?

I'm genuinely a positive person and I'm not out for killing Santa Claus, and this is such a positive saying, but platitudes like, "it is all going to be ok," may make one feel better, but objectively have no basis in truth.  That would have been a better saying to take on.

It depends on the perspective you are looking at it from.  So an infant dies, well [insert grand reason here], but it ignores the fact that--to that infant--no reason is going to be good enough to justify being dead.  I guess you could factor in some reward in heaven or something for dying to teach your parents to appreciate each moment with loved ones or something like that, but you get what I'm saying.

Once again, this doesn't discount that it is still a nice phrase we use to make ourselves feel better when things go wrong.  I mean, either it can suck or it's just God's way of teaching us a lesson or helping us achieve our fate.  The latter sounds a lot better.  But then I think, oh like the lesson, "don't drive drunk", which you learned because you crashed and died after drinking. Not much use you can make of that lesson now.  Oh..... it was the lesson to your alcoholic uncle.  I get it now.  That is an unfair Ponzi scheme.

I think the more apt motivation behind the phrase is that, you should be ever positive and look for the positive possibilities and opportunities in your negative experiences.   That life is a journey and everything that happens to you is part of what got you to where you are at (for the better or worse.)  That is a lesson that everyone should follow, I genuinely mean that, but not for the reason that you believe God let something bad happen to you so that he could later he could do something really good for you.  Really, a bit selfish and narcissistic, no?

What a wet blanket I feel like I'm being, but I'm not advocating taking away the comfort a person has when they believe this, but I'm just saying that there are other ways to deal with the fact that you don't always have control of what happens to you or your loved ones.  Bad things happens to good people and sometimes good things happens to bad people.  Life isn't always fair and our outcomes are not all equal.  I think when you accept that, you tend to appreciate good things even more.  There are many things you can do to improve your outcomes, but you should always be doing that.

Now of course, there is also the understanding that universe follows the rules of physics and you have the action reaction thing, so yes, there was an "actual reason" behind what happened, but it is not the profound future looking reason people impute into that statement.  Nor does it necessarily mean something better will come from it in the future.  Though I will say, when bad things happen, usually there is nowhere to go but up, so there is that is another good way of looking at it.

I heard this phrase the other day and it made remember that you can't always control life, a lot of things you can control to an extent, but life is really just what make of it.  So why not just work to make the best of it, no matter what your circumstances?  Some people have their faith which lets you have peace that god is in control, which works great for some people.

Having over thought this for longer than I had planned, for me it comes down to looking at "reason" in "future" or "past" tense.  Anything that happens in your "past" you can attribute to something positive that has happened to you since then.  It was the "reason" you were in the right place at the right time.  But it doesn't logically work like that going forward into the "future." You can't say, X bad thing happened to me today, but for the purpose of the unknown Y good thing happening in the future.

You know, maybe I'm just completely wrong, maybe I'll never understand "the reason", but you know what, if it really is a heavenly conspiracy outside of human understanding, then you don't know either, which doesn't make that statement true.  I don't really know why I went through this brain exercise, maybe because I felt like getting some much needed writing in, plus, it made me feel better.  Maybe hearing someone throw around the cliche happened for that reason.

what I should believe and what I do believe don't always match up