25 Things... Plus a Few More

1. It pleases me that I’m a fourth-generation native Texan, and that both my kids are native Texans.


2. I often remind myself of Kathy Bates’ famous quote from The Waterboy: “You don’t have what they call the social skills.”


3. Speaking of which: My first date with Staci was to the Wesley Foundation’s annual Spring Banquet. I got the Office Manager to find out if Staci would go with me (and I was 22 years old!).


4. I don’t have allergies, but I have been diagnosed with “chronic non-allergy rhinitis,” for which there’s no known cause and no known cure. Every couple of months or so, I have an “allergy meltdown” day, which involves uncontrollable sneezing and dozens of Kleenexes. On those days, the only thing that really gets the symptoms under control is sleep.


5. My biggest fear in life is that I’ll get to the end of it and realize how much more meaning and depth God had intended for me.


6. I’m still pleased that I was able to complete a sprint triathlon in 2008. Also, considering that it took me two years to raise my swimming ability from “Certain to Drown” to “Below Average,” I’m confident that anyone could do a triathlon.


7. I’ve become one of those weirdos who takes a fistful of vitamins every day. I figure I’m especially strange because I also take a supplement that’s made for livestock (there’s a link with more info on my posted items).


8. I used to go skydiving with Jon Mitchell. I was going to quit after jump #15 because it was getting time- and cost-prohibitive, but on jump #14 I forgot to pull the ripcord and nearly died. That was it for me.


9. Staci and I had a son who was stillborn in October 2005. Observing my daughter over the last six months has taught me volumes about what honest grieving and heartfelt remembrance looks like.


10. I realized nine weeks into my junior year of high school that I’d been referring to a classmate by the wrong name. Now, if I’m not at least 99% sure I have your name right, I’m likely to greet you with something like, “Hey! How’s it going, Mmmth?”


11. I was an avid Dallas Cowboys fan until Jerry Jones bought the team. These days, I give the Cowboys a polite golf clap when they do well, and I’m an avid baseball fan. (If I don’t point this out, someone else will: Since Jerry Jones bought the Cowboys, they’ve won three Super Bowls; meanwhile, the Texas Rangers have won one playoff game.)


12. One time on a spelunking trip, and friend and I got left by the rest of the group. I was kinda disappointed when the guide came back and found us, because I knew we’d found the right trail to get out.


13. I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if I wasn’t a Christian. I’m pretty sure I’d be more financially prosperous, and a whole lot more miserable.


14. I’ve sensed for a while now that my life will eventually revolve around missions work, although I still don’t know when, where, how, or why.


15. I never drank until after I got married. Now I enjoy a variety of beers and wines, although mainstream American beers (e.g. Coors, Budweiser, etc.) are an abomination, and should be used only for killing weeds and cockroaches.


16. People at work tease me about how strict I am with my kids, but really I think they are absolutely delightful! (That is, my kids are delightful. My co-workers are… also human beings.)


17. One of these days, Staci and I want to be in Sydney for the New Year’s Eve fireworks. New Year’s Eve, fireworks, middle of summer: It doesn’t get much better than that!


18. I have extensive, first-hand knowledge of the tunnels under Monterey High School. Other guilty parties tagged in this note shall remain nameless (at least until their kids are old enough to appreciate hearing the stories!).


19. I’m in a covenant group with Monty, Jeff, and Jason. The relationships I’ve developed with those guys are among the biggest blessings I’ve ever received.


20. I think it’s pretty cool that I’m left-handed, and I think it’s pretty cool that my daughter is, too.


21. I’m a horrible dancer. People tell me I need to listen for the beat, and I say, “The what?” (Side note: I took a beginning swim class a while back [see #6 above], and the instructor told me I needed to move through the water like I was dancing. When I mentioned I’m not any good at dancing, she replied, “No shit!”)


22. I’m getting better about this, but I’ve never really been comfortable being who I am. Staci once told me, “I wish you could see you the way other people see you.”


23. I’m incredibly near-sighted (-9.50 in both eyes). I’d like to have Lasik surgery, but my optometrist told me that since I’ve been wearing contacts for 20+ years, I would probably end up needing a corneal transplant five years down the road.


24. I can wiggle my ears (but it embarrasses me greatly whenever somebody asks me to do it).


25. I appreciate having a job that includes air conditioning, but I experience life most when I’m outdoors.


26. I’d pretty much always rather be too hot than too cold.


27. Like so many people who grew up in Lubbock, I had to move away to appreciate what a great place to live it is.


28. I’m convinced God has a sense of humor.


29. My future goals include running a marathon and completing the Buffalo Springs Lake triathlon, although my training has been affected by a bad psoas muscle. I believe it’s caused by a leg-length deficiency.


30. I’m basically a nerd, but this is just about the nerdiest thing ever: I really wanted to graduate magna cum laude from Tech, but I was poised to finish with a 3.699 GPA. I added a bowling class to my final 12 hours of summer school to raise my GPA to 3.701.


31. I’m a competitive person, but only when I feel like I can or should win. If we’re playing air hockey, spades, or Text Twist, then my goal is to crush you in the most gracious and merciful way possible. When it comes to playing something like miniature golf, I’m more able to just enjoy the experience.


32. I think pigeons are rats with wings, and I secretly cackle when I see one of their eggs splatted on the sidewalk outside my building. Some people say they’re God’s creatures, too. I say we should send as many as possible back to heaven so He can enjoy them more intimately.

Jay Leno's Headlines

So I found this article in a catalog for a travel/adventure company, and I'm going to send it in to Jay Leno. Yes, it's 7th-grade humor, but it's still amusing!

And I think I did a nice job Photoshopping the larger image, thank you very much!

On Health Food and Cheeseburgers

So I spent several months getting ready for a wee little triathlon held at Tech on 9/14, and a big part of my preparations involved eating healthy foods. I ate – and still eat – lots of protein and carbs, and I’m drinking a ridiculous amount of water every day. (I’ve even starting taking a supplement intended for livestock, but that’s another story.)

Now, I’ve always been a reasonably healthy eater, but I’ve also always given myself some leeway when it comes to eating out. I tend to rationalize that a healthy diet is about what you eat as a whole, and thus, eating something like a big, fat cheeseburger is OK when it’s time to go out.

Lately, though, that hasn’t been the case. For example, when I recently consumed a huge breakfast bowl complete with eggs, cheese, potatoes, bacon, and sausage, I quickly realized that I hadn’t bought that food so much as I’d rented it for a short time. I’ve grown so accustomed to healthy food that junk food is getting to the place that it isn’t worth the pain and discomfort I know it’ll cause later.

As the realization has dawned on me that it’s better for me to avoid greasy, fatty foods, it has occurred to me that there are some parallels with sin that can be drawn here. As my brilliant friend Sean G. once pointed out, sin has to be appealing on some level, or we wouldn’t struggle with it. Of course, sin has consequences, and it’s dealing with those consequences that isn’t always pleasant. I’m hoping to draw some practical application from the lessons I’ve learned with greasy cheeseburgers.

And for what it’s worth, I recently enjoyed a grilled chicken sandwich at a Texas Tech football game. (Seriously… who goes to a football game and gets a chicken sandwich?!)

Random Thoughts

Random thoughts that I’ve had tumbling around in my head lately:

Facebook Status
A couple of statuses (or is that statii?) that I’ve come up with for Facebook, but haven’t been brave enough to post:

• Glen just had a really stellar poop!
• Glen is thinking that, somehow, Katy Perry’s breakout song wouldn’t have been nearly so popular if it’d been recorded by a male and titled I Kissed a Guy (and I Liked It).

Olympics Coverage
So I certainly don’t have the qualifications to be a professional sports broadcaster, but that doesn’t stop me from snickering at those who are. One of my favorite lines during the Olympics came from a guy who was calling the BMX cycling. At the start of both the women’s and men’s events, he said, “Here we go – winner takes all.”

My thought was, “Really? The winner gets the gold, silver and bronze?”

Microsoft Error
This also makes me snicker: “Currently, there is no solution for the problem you reported.” Yeah, ‘cause the problem was Windows!


(Click for bigger image.)

Eat, Pray, Love

I recently finished reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. And I feel obliged to stop here and point out that this is definitely not the kind of book I would normally undertake. Staci asked me to read it so we could discuss it, and I agreed.

Anyway, Gilbert points out early on that she can’t call herself a Christian, which put me on my guard. And while there are spiritual aspects of her book that I simply can’t agree with, there are many others that challenge me.

Among them is a situation in which she describes herself as being completely desperate to hear from God, and she cries out to Him and demands an answer. Immediately, she gets one. In fact, she describes similar scenarios in other places in her book, where she calls on God, and He answers her.

Most of the conversations she describes with God are not examples of places where I can’t agree with her. The responses she describes seem very much in line with God’s character, as I understand it. However, reading her descriptions makes me feel (yeah, I know – I used the F word) simultaneously Pharisaical and jealous:

• Pharisaical because I think, "Hey, that’s not how you’re supposed to approach God." Part of me is indignant that she didn’t deliberately find a quiet place, clear her mind of its clutter, perhaps listen to some good Christian music, read a few Bible passages, and then, with all humility and meekness, politely ask God for His intervention in her life.


• Jealous because part of me says, "Wow, that’s more along the lines of the relationship I’d like to have with God." The steps I described above are more like the approach I take when I think about praying. It shouldn’t be hard to believe, then, that I don’t spend a lot of time praying.

There’s no doubt which approach is more Biblical. In Ephesians 3:12, Paul says, "Because of Christ and our faith in him, we can now come boldly and confidently into God's presence." Come to think of it, it’s also Biblical for God to use someone who’s not in His "club" to teach lessons to those who are.

Baseball Beatdown

I figure all of us have been on a horrendously bad sports team at one time or another. My seventh-grade football team was so bad that before the last game, our coach offered to buy us all a beer if we won. He later insisted he meant root beer, but either way, he was pretty confident he wouldn’t have to pay up.

For all of us who’ve ever had to endure a crushing defeat, we can at least take heart that it wasn’t as bad as this story from Yahoo! Sports:

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TOKYO, April 17 (Reuters) - A Japanese high school pleaded for a regional game to be abandoned after surrendering 66 runs in less than two innings, local media reported on Thursday.

The coach of Kawamoto technical high school threw in the towel to spare his pitcher’s arm with his team losing 66-0 with just one batter out in the bottom of the second.

The hapless hurler had already sent down over 250 pitches, allowing 26 runs in the first inning and 40 in the second before Kawamoto asked for mercy.

“At that pace the pitcher would have thrown around 500 pitches in four innings,” Kawamoto’s coach was quoted as saying. “There was a danger he could get injured.”

Opponents Shunshukan were officially credited with a 9-0 victory, giving the line score a tinge of respectability for the luckless Kawamoto school.

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Wow! Even my junior high football team wasn’t that bad!

Sinus Mess

So I’m in the midst of yet another sinus infection. It has occurred to me that I’ve been averaging about three sinus infections a year for the past 6 years, and this is my fourth one since December. It’s really frustrating, especially since training for a triathlon is difficult when you’re sick all the time. Thus, I went to my doctor yesterday armed with the attitude that “if what you’re doing isn’t working, do something else.”

He reviewed my records, and he agreed that something different is, in fact, called for. He mentioned something called a sinus ablation. It’s a relatively new procedure in which the sinuses are removed and replaced with a balloon-like device (kind of like an angioplasty). I had preliminary X-rays done yesterday, and assuming those show that I’m a good candidate, I’m supposed to have the procedure done on May 6. You can read more about the procedure at www.sinusablation.info.