Category Archives: Life

Blogging Tip

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Okay, I know what you’re saying.  ”What the hell can he tell me about blogging?  He can’t even manage to post anything in 3 weeks.”

Yeah, that’s what my tip is about.  Don’t write a post about starting to post more and reinvigorating you blog in the middle of the World Cup, when you’re about to move into your first house, and you just got new responsibilities at work that consistently keep you at the office 10-12 hours a day every day.

So we’re pretty much moved in now and the World Cup is over *sniff*, but the work thing hasn’t abated yet.  That being said, we’re going to make a go at this.  Posts will likely shorter than some used to be, but its better than nothing.  We’ll see what happens.

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Breaking the Box Again

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I’m the youngest of three, and as I grew up through my teen, high school, and college years I subconsciously put my older brother and sister into “boxes” of how I viewed them.  I superimposed on them a persona based upon my understanding of their lives and my relationship with them.  They were always my brother or sister, but they were always placed into a context in my head.

Over time they’ve repeatedly messed up my head by…well… living.  The first instance of this was the first time I was on the phone with my brother at work and he told me he had to go because he had a meeting.  Now, I recognize this is a totally everyday, mundane thing, but at that moment he was no longer just the brother that I played soccer and partied with in college.  He was a grown up with a job.  I had already realized he was a grown up and had a job, but at that point it was officially official.  He thought I was weird for thinking that at the time, and he probably still does.

It took a little while for that to happen with my sister.  She is older than me and when I was a teen she was already in college and working so she was in the working adult box from pretty early on.  She broke that box when I saw her with her first baby for the first time, and the first thing I thought was, “holy crap my sister is a mom.”  Yeah, I knew she had her baby and she was a mom, but she was like, really a mom.  Again, this is a completely natural progression of life that for some reason hadn’t sunk in until it was right there in front of me.  And for the record I think she’s a bad ass at work and being a mom.

The most recent breaking of a box is chalked up to my brother.  He and his wife just had their first baby and he’s a freaking dad.  I have to say that again.  He’s a freaking dad.  I don’t expect this to have the same impact on anyone else, but this totally throws me for a loop, even though it shouldn’t.  My brother and I are two years apart so we’ve shared many life experiences and have had a long standing, health sibling rivaly, and I generally think he’s a big goon in a good sort of way.  He’s looked forward to having a family for a while, and the goofiness in him that made it hard for me to see him as a father is probably one of the qualities that’s going to make him an awesome dad and make his kids love him.

In closing, box broken, my brother is a dad, and I’d just like to say, “welcome to the world BroJr.”  I’m completely psyched for my brother and sister-in-law and I can’t wait to make a trip up to MN. to meet him for the first time.  I also reserve the right to take a moment to process my brother holding him the first time I see it in person.

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What about Before the Beginning?

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So I’m reading this article on BBC’s news site, which I finally understood after the third read, and it got me thinking bigger thoughts than I probably should have been having.  Soon thereafter I needed to lay down and take a nap.  In the hopes that I’m not the only one that will give himself a headache contemplating this article, here are a few of the questions and thoughts that popped into my head.

Okay, so black holes might be a precursor to the formation of a galaxy.  That’s cool.  We can see back some 13 billion years to study this phenomenon.  That fact boggles the mind.  So we’re getting a clearer picture of what happened in the beginning.  But here’s my question; what was there before the beginning?

I know, I know, the beginning is the start of stuff so there isn’t anything before the beginning, but how can that be?  If you’re a creationist, then God made everything.  If that’s true, what was God doing before he made everything and where did he come from?  Was he just hanging out in darkness doing nothing?

If you’re a strict evolutionist/Big Bang Theorist, then the Universe was created when an extremely dense, hot mass of stuff exploded and everything has been expanding since then.  So my question here is what was all that mass doing before it exploded and what was it sitting in.  Was it just a ball of mass sitting in a huge emptiness, and what was the catalyst for it to actually explode?  And where did the mass come from in the first place?

This is about time my head started to hurt, and its doing so again so I’m going to leave it at that.  Someone really smart answer my questions for me.

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Getting Older

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So I’ll start by stating that by no means am I old. I’m sure people will laugh at the title as I let you know that I’m still in my early thirties. The purpose isn’t to reflect on aches and pains never experienced before, I think the purpose of this post is more a reflection on moments you have in your day-to-day life where you stop and say, “wow…I’m getting old.”

A few examples…

A particularly curious one for me was not too long after graduating from college I was watching the news when a story grabbed my attention. Not for the content of the story, but for the description of the person involved. To quote the newscaster, “A 20 year old man…” and that was it. I being 24 at the time realized, “Holy crap…if they were talking about me on the news, they would call me a man. I’m not a man… I’m a stupid kid just out of college still trying to figure out what the heck to do next!”

A more recent change for me that I’m baffled by has been my recent change in leisure listening habits. Now normally this would have been referred to as a change in my music preferences, but that’s just the problem. I find myself not listening to music anymore. I’ve become a talk radio/podcast junkie. Anytime I get in the car, I look for NPR news or sports talk radio.  During the week I ride the bus so I subscribe to about a half dozen different podcasts to keep me entertained. Gone are the days of goings to concerts all summer long or rushing out to buy a new album on release day – unless it’s PJ of course. Nope, I’m good with “NPR’s Fresh Air” or the “How Stuff Works.com” podcasts.

So I haven’t really had any of those “wow I sound like my parents” moments, but that’s most likely b/c I don’t have any kids. My question to the two readers we have (we may even have three now) is this:

What moments have made you stop in your tracks and ask, “what the heck was that!?!” Leave your thoughts in the comments.

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