You like the new layout?
Or more importantly, do you like my new hair? Sure, I look like a prepubescent little boy, but at least now I won’t have to ask my wife to help me with my hair every single day! Don’t worry ladies, I’ll grow it out again, be patient, it’ll come.
On a slight side note, I was Arwen’s first real head to cut hair on. Needless to say she did a great job. Three cheers for R1…

Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.

I’ve been learning a lot lately about peace making. Here are a couple of interesting things that I’d love for you to give your thoughts about. I’ve still got a lot to learn, but much of it resonates quite a bit with me.
Bit number uno:

Violence can never stop violence because its very success leads others to imitate it

Bit numero two:

Pacifism takes balls. No seriously, anyone can strike someone back when attacked. But it takes some serious courage and faith to purposefully choose not to hit back but to instead make an active stand for peace. Take some time if you can and google some stories of what peacemakers have done. It is ballsy. It is courageous. And it is anything but a gutless way out!

Bit number three:

Supposedly Gandhi would prefer a brave violent man over a peaceful coward. A violent man can be taught the ways of peacemaking, but a coward cannot be taught anything. This resonated with me while thinking about being a father of a son. Because in this line of thought my first priority is to encourage my son to be brave and courageous in standing up against evil. If my first priority is to create a peace loving son the end result might be a fearful and cowardly one. Courage must come before being a peacemaker. Otherwise you teach caving to fear, and that is not what Jesus calls us to.

“Blessed are the Peacemakers for they will be called sons of God”
– Jesus

Before I go into the facts I must say that we don’t use our mini back yard. We tend to reside in the house, the front yard, and parks. So our backyard is in bad shape. And one side particularly is overgrown with grassy weeds. With that said lets move on to the mystery at hand.
Here are the facts:

1. Two boards were physically ripped off our locked back gate thus creating a hole big enough for someone to squeeze through.
2. A worn down path was made in the weeds from the broken gate to our patio cement slab
3. Near the fence and connected to the worn down path was a bigger matted down area in the weeds
4. Next to the cement slab there were two nearly brand new New Balance shoes carefully placed side by side as if displayed at a store.

Additional potentially pertinent info:

1. We live next to a train yard
2. We live in meth central
3. There is a small kids wading pool in our back yard
4. This whole week we spent a majority of our time at my parents house because of Tara, Eric, and Malak

So what’s your guess? Come on all you CSI wanna be’s, figure out how scared my family should be!

I watched Disturbia last night. Pretty good movie. Kind of scary for the wife (especially considering we just discovered that we probably had a bum sleeping in our backyard!). Anyway, it got me thinking about something, something that strangely enough I find disturbing.
Here’s the strange thing. I’ve known a few guys who openly and flauntingly gawk at women as they pass by. Checking out their every feature and imaginatively disrespecting them in a way that they had better not do to my wife. While I’ve known a few guys who do that, in general it’s kind of a faux pax (is that how you spell it?) to completely check out a woman in public isn’t it? At the very least it can be said that it’s completely and in every way wrong for a grown adult man to check out a high school girl right? And yet movies (and I could list a whole lot here) proudly display teenage girls as eye candy for adult grown men. And it is totally acceptable in our culture for me to watch, drool, and enjoy watching these films that display these under age and under dressed girls. Is that strange?
I don’t go to the movie rental stores that often anymore. They’ve become quite expensive and I always end up walking around for 45 minutes wihtout much luck in finding that one right movie that I’d like to watch that night. I remember when I was younger and we’d go to many rental places and they all had those back rooms that were blocked with a black curtain. I was told not to go in there, that they have bad movies in there for adults only. As I grew up I found out that those back rooms were filled with porn. So as places like Blockbuster and Hollywood video began to pop up those back rooms filled with smut became something from the past.
Well I was shocked yesterday by how much quasai porn stuff there was at Blockbuster! I mean like every other movie is a poorly done boob-filled movie. Have you noticed? You must have! It’s like every other movie, no joke!

Maybe it’s just me. But right now I’m disgusted by my gender.