RedGage

i have another confession, redgage.  a majority of my more jam-packed blogs are on myspace.  inside of these blogs you'll find a few of my pseudonyms, my emotion based writing, and my invigorating stream of consciousness.  but fret not, redgage.  i will soon have to shut that blog down for administrational reasons.  very soon i start--nervousness and excitement come to mind right now--my student teaching, and i can no longer leave my words for any of the students to find.  what this means is that all my blogging will be done solely on redgage.  this also means that i may have some new stories to share.  

speaking of stories, i want to share one with you right now.  this is a story--all about how my life got flipped, turned upside down--i heard a while back while asking questions about my life. (fresh prince really never should have been canceled by the way.)  

***

a young girl was on the beach one day, her father watching from inside the house, and she decided to wanted to build a hole.  keep in mind her first few tries went with the tide (literally.)  after moving her surprisingly effective shovel and resilient dedication for this hole up the beach, she began again.  the father thinking she was building a sand castle continued about his business.  shortly after the father looked outside to see what his daughter was doing.  to his surprise the young girl had built herself a hole deep enough to where only her head was showing.  the father rushed outside to speak with this master digger to see what was going on.  he asks, "honey, why are you building this hole so close to the ocean?"  without stopping from her business she responded with, "i'm trying to catch part of the ocean, daddy."  the father smiled and told his beloved daughter, "honey, the whole ocean is already behind you.  you don't need a hole to catch it."

***

i don't know why and, to this day, i probably won't know why i enjoyed this story so much.  i try to fit this story into conversations where i know the other party needs to hear something uplifting, but sometimes fitting this story into meaning can be difficult.  i guess the girl looking to catch part of the ocean is like me trying to catch part of myself.  maybe i just need to jump right in.

i had an idea of starting this particular blog with a fun fact about how our (humans) average attention span is about seven seconds.  i wanted to see what seven seconds meant for reading and i came up with the odd number of fifteen.  after fifteen words your mind starts to lose a bit of focus and drift off into something else.  that means that after the first sentence of this blog, your mind may have already drifted away from your own focus.  thus the title of my blog is aptly named "bull-riding attention" because of how we're sort of riding short bursts of attention spans.  that means, sorry to say, no bull-riding techniques for you bull-riders that stumbled across this blog.  but i guess i could give you one suggestion from a totally unbiased third party.  i don't know if any animal likes to be rode on.  i always look at horses and have to wonder to myself, boy they picked the short straw on reincarnation.  so you're a human this time, but don't be surprised if you come back looking like one of those looney tunes cartoon sketched bulls.  

i was thinking the other day about "it's a wonderful life" and how i don't think i've ever really watched that movie.  and if i did, it was only the clip with jimmy stewart, "what is you want, mary? what do you want? you--you want the moon?  just say the word and i'll throw a lasso around it and pull it down.  hey that's a pretty good idea.  i'll give you the moon, mary."  i think this alone makes me want to watch the movie in its entirety.  funny how a line seemingly simple can sound so great behind the right voice.

the new year is quickly approaching and i am thinking it came too fast.  for some reason it doesn't seem like a full year has passed.  it almost looks like some weeks were stolen from me.  i wanted to see how many days we slept away in the year--thinking this is where most of my good time went--and i came across a yahoo question that simply asked, "why do we sleep?"  i would like to say that we sleep in order to magnify being awake, but i don't know if my flawed theory accounts for dreams.  if sleeping were just a way for us to appreciate being awake, then why do dreams usually involve something that may never happen while we were awake.  if i really had to come up with an answer to this question, i would say that we sleep because humans might not be ready to handle being awake all the time.  i don't think our society is ready for a workable, reliable, or a beneficial 24-hour period of life.  even the places that stay open all day operate on shifts.  our bodies can sustain life for years on end, they can fight infections and survive viruses, but yet they can't fight off the urge to recharge, so to speak.  i'm sure any scientist would agree that sleep is what guarantees us life, but i thought life was guaranteed to us by oxygen.  obviously there are other factors involved, but if sleep is just a way to ensure we breathe more oxygen, then sleep is a means to an end.  in a sense sleep is just another tool in the workings of life itself.  so i say that if we must sleep, then we must dream as well.  if we dream while we sleep, we give meaning to sleep.  we give sleep more than just a single purpose.  we give sleep the great fortune of being the force that allows us into another world.  a world beyond our waking, oxygen filled, pawn pieced lives.  

belief is a powerful thing.  belief is what keeps humans going.  belief is key and unique to the human species.  animals have instincts.  bugs have ridiculous spawning abilities.  even plants have a luxurious lifestyle to lead.  but humans believe.  this is what we do or what we should be doing with out precious life.  i like to think that any belief, good or bad, has no way of being wrong.  i was wrong.  a belief can be wrong because that belief may truly not be a belief.  a wish can masquerade as a belief.  if you believed the cowboys were going to win the superbowl, i don't think your belief was wrong, i think your wish was wrong.  if you believe in a higher power that created the heaven and the stars, i don't think you wish a higher power to exist.  you could wish for other things.  you could wish for a utopian world, but instead you believe that some higher power guides the universe and the people inside of that universe.  a belief is something worth fighting for.  a wish is something people tend to fight more for.  a wish can have many names: intentions, desires, goals, objectives, or even hope.  but a belief can only be a belief. there is nothing wrong with a wish, but a belief can make those wishes become far more powerful.  

i'm talking about belief in this sense because i want to clarify why i made the video i'm going to share with you.  i think president elect obama wishes for this country to change.  i think president elect obama wishes for this world to change.  but i really think president elect obama believes that he is the one to help spark and bring about this change.  if his belief is strong enough, then his wishes may come true.  but his belief is not wrong here.  his wishes may be skewed, as wishes can tend to be, but that is where belief comes in.  if president elect obama relies on belief, there is still a chance for change to actually come about.  i made this video not to support obama as the first man to stand up for what he believes in, but the first president in some time now who still has belief.  i'm not interested in his politics.  i'm interested in his beliefs.  i'm not interested in what dog he puts in the white house.  i'm interested in what he believes.  if he continues to believe, then obama has the chance to wish for things far greater than lower taxes.  i made this video because obama believes and he showed the world his belief.  he shouted his belief with words he never said.  his wishes did the speaking for his belief.  this is why i made the video.  to remind people that belief is what matters.  belief drives us all.  belief is our innate right.  please don't waste belief because you get too caught up in wishes.  please don't judge an individual by their wishes and then turn around and wish them failure.  instead believe your belief and figure out what you are going to do with that belief.  i think we all know obama figured out what he wanted to do with his.  now it's our turn.

the video here.

if the link doesn't work, you can go onto youtube and type in my username (andmarktube).  the video is called 'believe'

enjoy your new years redgage.  i tip my glass to you and to another year of life.

-mark 2008-