no way xanga looks like my xanga again!!

I know who goes before me
I know who stands behind
the God of angel armies
is always by my side

The One who reigns forever
He is a friend of mine
the God of angel armies
is always by my side.

My God loves me so much. My heart is so full being in His presence. Do you know the feeling you get when you feel at home after being in a strange land for awhile? That is how I feel when I am with Him. I always have this thought, “this is where I am supposed to be. this is who I am.” And I am happy and at rest.

You Should Date An Illiterate Girl

By Charles Warnke

Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly.

Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.

Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common ground like sushi, and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale, or the evenings get long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn’t fucking collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice.

Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn’t, smile all the same.

Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail, frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return, or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn’t read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love.

Do those things, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent as a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, god damnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.

Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.

Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.

Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so god damned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. I hate you. I really, really, really hate you.

wow.

worship.

i love You Jesus.

i realized my problem..

i like everyone

God will save the day

and all will say

my Glorious

glory glory send the glory

glory glory send the glory

glory glory send the glory

glory glory send the glory

glory glory send the glory

how long do rabbits live? my friends would ask.

10-15 if they are treated well in the home i would say.

jlo lived til she was 10.  5 of them were spent with me.

Peter Kwan had her first. He adopted her from a pet shop. She was six months old. He named her after the celebrity because as he said, “her rear grew faster than the rest of her.”

When I got her, she was 3. Peter had become a consultant after college and could not find anyone to take care of her. His postings on craigslist were fruitless so I took her into my studio on the last day before he had to leave.

She came with a small cage. She only ate pellets at the time and had a small litter box. I remember the first time she felt comfortable enough to come out. She would only explore for a little while before hopping back in. She always did things on her own accord.  

 I had no idea how to care for a rabbit at the time but I learned quickly from researching and joining rabbit community mailing lists. The House Rabbit Society is awesome.

I remember reading that female rabbits eventually get uterine cancer if they are not spayed. So I made the difficult decision and brought Jlo to a vet. When I brought her home, I cried. Seeing the stitches on her shaved belly and knowing she was in pain for reasons she didn’t understand was hard. I took a part of her body away from her.

Her personality changed after she was spayed. That was always hard for me to admit. I had her for two months before the surgery. She was so much braver, so much more personable back then. After, she became more easily spooked and would retreat often into her cage.

To interact with her more, I started reading about clicker-training. Jlo was incredibly smart. Also independent. She quickly learned how to follow a target (a ball on a stick) for treats. She learned how to respond to the command “up” by standing on her hind legs within two days. (She also started doing tricks on her own in an effort to get treats. Sorry, no.) I remember her dashing back and forth, running laps as if she were in the Indy 500. She was mine and I was hers. I never thought of her as a pet.  She was a roommate.

In the meantime, Gabriel had adopted two male rabbits, who were brothers. Though they were “bonded” initially, that bond broke apart and they began viciously fighting. So Gabe brought the rabbit that was constantly getting beat up to me for Jlo. His name was Appa.

Where Jlo was feminine and smart, cautious and independent, Appa was clumsy and athletic, curious and submissive. Ray and I spent months bonding them in the bathtub while Gabriel and Joey watched on webcam. (Rabbits are initially mistrustful of each other and will attack. It takes time to “bond” them. Typically once they are bonded, they are companions for life.) I remember Jlo’s wtf-get-me-out-of-here face the first time I put her in in the tub with him.

Jlo and Appa became bonded. She demanded grooming often and Appa would comply. It was no longer the rabbit and me then and that made me sad. But I was happy for her that she had a companion when I was at work or out. There were times of mischief – like when they chewed a hole under my bed and made it their hiding place. Or when I found Appa with a plastic skirt around his belly, having gotten himself stuck in a bag and being unable to reach around to chew it completely off.

They had several living situations throughout the years. From a cage to a pen to being free roam to a “condo” built out of Target storage cubes. My apartment was often filled with cardboard boxes for them to chew and interact with. They ate fresh vegetables which I bought weekly in addition to hay and pellets. I’m so thankful they were both litter-box trained though rabbits apparently poop a ton. Despite the fur and hay everywhere, I would agree that they are pretty clean animals in and of themselves.

They both moved with me when I upgraded from a studio to a one bedroom. They also upgraded because I had so much more room. When I made the decision to move back to my parent’s house to start saving money for seminary, Jlo and Appa moved up to Boston to live with Gabriel for awhile until I got up here. Not having a car or my own place, I wasn’t able to see them much when I started school. I’m thankful because I know Gabe and Joey took great care of them.

Yesterday, Joey called me and told me Jlo was on her side. Her leg was shaking and she had soiled herself. She had already been sick recently, probably had cataracts and was getting old. I knew it was time. He brought her to the vet and they put her to sleep. I knew it was ok. I knew my Jlo. She is smart and brave. She would understand.

I wasn’t always the best friend/mom to her. There were many nights when I went to sleep without feeding them until the next morning because I was too tired from being out. I made her bleed once when I didn’t know how to clip black nails and cut too deep. She and I have had times when we were closer and when we were not. But I loved and respected her immensely. And I felt on a deeper level, we understood each other.

I used to imagine that when Christ returns and the new creation is here, Jlo and i would be able to fully communicate with each other. We wouldn’t have the distance that exists between animal and human.  I don’t know if that will be true. But I know that God loved her very much to create such an extraordinary rabbit.     

Rest in peace Jlo. Thanks for letting me care for you for a little while.