Urban Onramps

No, sir, I don’t. Tonight at 6pm it’s a birthday bbq here at my house with us’s and some friends. Last night, well, I felt like bbq’ing, so I did. Buncha carne. So grilling two nights straight, hot diggity. I’m tired, tho. I slept with no blanket or nothing, on the couch (Sam was taking up space in my bed; he wanted to be close to his mommy; the medicines make him like that sometimes). It went to a low of 72 overnight, maybe 70, so I was fine, but still a bit cold. So I got up and went swimming at the gym. That was basically the best part of my birthday – going to the gym early and swimming a little bit. Peace. You can’t take your cell phone into the pool. So tonight it’s a gang of food, more movie-watching, kids hollering. Bonus: Our friends Elizabeth and Lalo from Mexico City are staying with us for a week. They have a 7-month old baby boy, Josue, who’s a cute one. I switched my urbanonramps host from fatcow to bluehost. Fatcow was just giving me a bunch of low performance issues, and bluehost is about the same price (a tad less) and yet I get 15 gigs of disk space instead of just 1, among other improvements. Plus I’m a geek, and doing something like switching web hosts is really really interesting. Right now I’m transferring via FTP the files from the old account to the new one, while watching The Best Man on USA. I’m about to head out the door to Vons to get my own birthday cake – but no cake this year, I get (drum roll) cupcakes. Kafi allowed Sam to choose my cake, and he chose cupcakes. Oh well. I think I’ll treat myself to some beer. So it’s beer and cupcakes for this birthday boy. Men, don’t act like you never thought of this yourself. Plus tonight I’m going to eat grilled steak with my hands. Watch. It’s my birthday.

90 minutes in the life of a Christian summer camp director

My birthday is tomorrow. I will be 39.

I was walking on the sidewalk from the Harambee Prep School side to my office on the corner. A woman was driving by in a van. She screeched a greeting out the window, pulled over the van, jumped out of the vehicle, and hurried over to me. She hugged me, said it’s been a long time, then pulled out her checkbook and started writing. She stopped and said, “The Lord told me to come up here, but he didn’t say who I should write the check to,” she confessed. “I’ll write it wherever you say, Rudy. Do you and Kafi have a need?” I checked myself. “Write it to Harambee,” I said. “I’ll show my staff the check and tell them what happened here right now.” Ok, she said. And that’s what happened.

Oh, it was a thousand bucks.

I’ve moved my son’s blog to a new location. The old one is just slow slow slow. Here’s the place to keep up with my son as he undergoes cancer treatment:

samueljob.wordpress.com

I’m getting closer. But it’s usually a bad sign if you like a section of what you’ve written a lot, yet you are nowhere close to done writing. What you like may impede your progress, cuz you will work around it, trying to preserve that piece you like, and suffocate the “story.” THAT, my friends, is the best piece of advice I got from undergrad. There’s another great piece of advice I got during college, but I can’t remember it right now.

Bruce Hansen. Just gotta say your name. Keep up the good work, bro.

Yes, I like HBO’s Entourage. Yes, DJ, I downloaded Hell’s Bells. What an opening riff! I wish old Martin Luther had taken THAT music and slapped some Christian lyrics on it. Can you imagine that?

Some heds:

• Global Trade Talks Collapse Over Farm Aid: Not good… keep an eye on this.
• Believing in Blair High School: Working hard to develop one Pasadena’s public schools
• Is SETI Barking up the Wrong Tree?: This is the project where they’ve been searching for signs of life, radio signals, from space. In 46 years they’ve found… jack squat. Ain’t nuthin out there, friends, even if the Vatican’s astronomer thus speculates. This guy thinks so, too: Alone in the Universe.
• August 16 – this is gonna be good: HBO Presents: When the Levees Broke, A Spike Lee Film

I dig the International Music Feed. It’s what I wish MTV would have become, instead of what it is.

Max Torres is the new program director at Bayshore Christian Ministries in East Palo Alto. Good for them. Max, among other things, will preach a great sermon at your church that appeals to all ages, if you invite him. Years back, Max was the one who told me I was late to my sit-down with Dubya, and got me there on time. Glad you are so close, bro.

This just in: French scouring country for someone sick enough to win Tour (de France): Mark-in-Mexico sez, “Lance Armstrong is a brain cancer survivor once given only a 5-10 percent chance to survive. Floyd Landis cannot walk without severe pain and must undergo hip replacement surgery before riding in another race. Neither has ever failed a drug test and they have been subjected to hundreds, if not thousands. Armstrong won 7 straight tours and, upon his retirement after last year’s victory, Landis limped in on his bum hip to keep the 2006 yellow jersey on American soil, or soiled by Americans, depending on your point of view. The French and the other Europeans must find some people sick enough to compete with the Americans.”

More Gaming The System: How I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal for free: I had some airline miles on some other airline (not American or United). I used some of those miles to get a free subscription to the Wall Street Journal wherein they deliver the paper to my house. Anyone who ever visits my house knows these papers tend to stack up in my driveway. But I digress. So because of airline miles, I’m getting Adventures-in-Capitalism for free. But wait! There’s more! I go online and look at the online subscription requirement. Basically, you just need to punch in your newspaper subscription ID and you get FREE ACCESS TO THE WSJ ONLINE, since I’m already a print subscriber. Bonus! So, look, even if you only fly once in a while, on different airlines, go on and sign up for their frequent flyer program. I started flying with John Perkins back in October 1990, so it takes years for things to accrue. But accrue they will. Sign up, even if it’s San Gabriel Valley Airlines or Trashcanistan Express. Who knows, they may merge, like TWA and American, or USAirways and America West, and then you’ll be sitting on… on… on enough miles to subscribe to Rolling Stone or something.

I’m trying to hammer out a thought. It’s tough to put together, cuz it’s (drumroll)

nuanced

Nuance doesn’t play well in today’s world. You are either for or against someone. A side is good and the other side, evil. But some things take nuance to explain.

For example, when it comes to solutions to poverty coming from the political right or the political left, it’s one thing to advocate an idea, but a totally different thing to “put your shoulder to plow” (to use an out-of-context farming metaphor). There are things you learn when you are committed to working on a challenge, when you don’t give up, when you devote years of your life to a resolution. Right and Left start to blur. Then right and left lose meaning, because finding solutions to centuries-old challenges nearly always involves “inventing” solutions. You make the road as you walk, indeed.

(I’m still hashing this out…)

(I’m thinking out loud here…)

There’s this quote I’m looking for as it relates to war. Something about how, “Every battle plan goes out the window, or is outdated, the moment the first shot is fired.” I think that’s an appropriate way to look at people, discipleship, ministry, church, poverty-fighting. You have to constantly evaluate what is going on around you. THE MINUTE you stop evaluating, well, you begin to get off track.

John Perkins has this phrase about, “Justice is eternal vigilance.” I don’t know where he got that; maybe he came up with it; but I worked with him for years, he’s a humble listener who will take any good idea from anywhere and make it work for him. But Justice is eternal vigilance; I like it. Right and Left don’t tell us what we need to know when it comes to fighting for justice.