Shreveport

I have arrived in Shreveport! In the morning, I will go to the Stoner Boat Launch...or Stoner Boat Ramp, I forget what it's called...and participate in the 23rd annual Turkey Trot! For some reason, I really like the phrase "Turkey Trot." Couldn't tell you why except that I always say it in a hyper-enthusiastic childish voice in my head.

Although the Turkey Trot is only a 5K, I would like to try and make a streak out of my five mile run on Monday, so I'm going to aim to run 5 miles then walk a bit more. Not sure it's possible since my legs still feel pretty beat up.

I'm very happy to be out of Arkansas, even if it's just going to be fora few hours! Not that there's anything wrong with Arkansas; I just like to leave regularly.

It's Like Finding a Mailbox in a City!

People like to talk about how difficult it is to find needles in haystacks. Well, lemme tell yuh, I have found needles in hay stacks before, but I have almost never found one of those durn blue post office drop boxes if I didn't know where it was when I started looking for it. As part of filing some documents for a case, I had to mail copies to opposing counsel. I drove around for 10 minutes, stopped and asked a pedestrian for help, stopped at a restaurant and asked a waitress for directions, then FINALLY just went to the nearest post office. That was a hassle.

In other news, I am about to leave Little Rock for the lovely city of Shreveport, where I will "Kick Some Bird" and participate in their 23rd annual Turkey Trot! I'm very excited about this opportunity to kick off my "Joggin' 'round the World" program down in Louisiana! Unfortunately, the forecast for Shreveport and Little Rock is absolutely awful. I'm going to be running in thunderstorms, then driving through thunderstorms, then celebrating my Thanksgiving in, literally, freezing weather in Little Rock.

At least it will be eventful. In the past, Thanksgivings have been kind of boring for me.

Also, on Saturday, my sister is hosting a party to watch the Arkansas Razorbacks play the LSU Tigers. Seeing as how I'm somewhat of a Louisianaphile, I can't 100% root for the Hogs, but I'll be there. Folks reading this who know me and my sister should totally cancel whatever other plans they may have and come. I'm told that if any other teetotalers show up, I will be allowed to play at least one game of Diet Coke pong on my brother-in-law's beer pong table. The invitation and Diet Coke-inducement are not directed at anyone in particular. <whistles all innocent-like>

Quick Update

Today:
5 miles, no stopping
Exactly 1 hour
Average pace: 5 mph/12 minute mile
Boo-yah

Yesterday:
Starbucks Gold Member
Boo-yah-kah-mo-fo'in-shah

Nicotine Free Since 1983!

OK, not actually since 1983, but I think I'm finally getting back to normal after two weeks of struggling through nicotine withdraw. Today is the 2 week mark since the last time I had nicotine from any source. Oh, and it's the 6 week mark since the last time I had any alcohol.

-Desire to blabber incessantly about my feelings and accomplishments for outside validation/praise: diminishing
-Ravenous hunger for anything and everything fattening and sugary: leveling out
-Sanity, to the extent ever possessed: returning
-Insane, irrational, impossible-to-quell self-confidence: you know it
-Ability to wake up after less than 8 hours and still be functional: yep yep yep
-Writing skills: on the rebound

I'm back, baby!

Yea Though I Walk

Good evening!

Those of you who know me know that it is not often that I am given pause to consider scripture. However, this evening, I was taking a walk and I think I finally understood the imagery in Psalm 23. The full text of the Psalm is:

The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul:
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name' sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: For thou art with me;
Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies;
Thou annointest my head with oil; My cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the House of the Lord forever.

This psalm is particularly important to me emotionally because my mother once embroidered a bit of...I don't know, it was like a miniature blanket or something that she then framed and gave to my grandmother, her mother as a gift. My mother embroidered this psalm on some cloth once and reading it at my grandparents' was my first exposure to Christianity. 

As the title of this post suggests, I am focused primarily with the meaning of the line "yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death."

While I was walking today, I was walking beneath a hill that blocks the sun at sunset. This made me think of walking in the valley of the shadow of death. It used to be that I thought that line meant "the valley of death," that in life we walked along a ridge and if we stumbled, we'd fall to the bottom of the valley and probably snap our neck on the way down. However, thinking about it logically, if you were walking in the valley of the shadow of death, assuming a translation error allowing for "in the valley in the shadow of death" then we are actually walking at the very bottom of the valley, and death is casting a shadow over us. In fact, death is such a daunting, fearful mountain that dominates our consciousness so completely that it casts a shadow that blinds us to the path that leads us safely through the valley. The only light we can see walking through the valley in the shadow of death is the light of "life everlasting" promised to us at the end. 

I think one way to interpret the psalmist's imagery is to say that death casts such a dark, impenetrable shadow that we can't see our feet or the ground we're stepping on. Whether we are walking on the right path or not, every step we take toward the light promising everlasting peace at the end of the valley is an act of faith. Faith that God will lift the path up to meet us (stole that metaphor from an Irish "have a nice day" saying).

I guess what I'm saying is "our knowledge of our own mortality and fear of our own death constricts our view so much that we can't see the right path forward without faith." From there, you can say "if you confront and accept death, its shadow decreases and you can see the way forward" or just stick with "you've gotta have faith." 

Whichever way you choose, you'll probably get where you're heading.

P.S. The way I said this all in my head on my walk was WAY better than what I wrote here.

1/40 of the Way to 1000 Miles!

Today marks the end of the second week of my quest to become a Runatic (running fanatic...DUH!), and I finished it up with a great run. I jogged 4.5 miles in a row, then ran an extra 200+ yards toward the end of the walk back to the office, just to keep my heart guessing. I still jog barely faster than I walk (at least for the first half of the run), but I'm getting to where I can speed up a bit and do some interval training to increase my overall capacity. Also, finishing a full 4.5 mile jog means that I increased my total to 25 miles for the last two weeks! For those of you who have never gone 4 years without running at all to starting up a running program at random one day, that's pretty good.

So, in two weeks, I went 25 miles. So, if I see absolutely no improvement in the future, that means I should get to my goal, 1000 miles, in 79 weeks (about 1.5 years). I'm pretty confident that I'll start getting faster and increasing the length and frequency of my jogs, so I think I'll be hitting the 1000 mile mark before next Thanksgiving.

Now that I've proven to myself that I can run, I want to set some goals.
By January 1, 2011:
-Consistent 10 minute mile (6 miles per hour); I'm currently doing about a 14 minute mile (estimate)
-Weight down to 240 pounds (currently back up to 255 from a low of 250)
-Able to run 6 miles in a stretch
-Run 6 miles at least 4 times per week
-Buy sweatpants and sweatshirts, because it is going to get COLD after Thanksgiving!

How to Tell When Someone Isn't Listening to You

Earlier today I was sitting outside of Starbucks enjoying a cup of coffee and an unseasonably beautiful day here in Little Rock. A woman walked into Starbucks, leaving her dog outside. The dog was, itself, kind of interesting. It was the breed of dog that looks like a greyhound but with really long fur. The woman left the dog untied while she went inside, and it did an admirable job of behaving itself like a well-behaved dog should. A few minutes later, a couple of young women--not sure how old they were but probably early college-aged--walked by and immediately starting gushing about how "pretty he is." After recovering from the shock of two girls were calling me "pretty" I realized they were actually talking about the dog. They had both gone over, about ten feet away from me, and were leaning over the dog and fawning. A woman who works at that Starbucks--Joley or Jolene or Jo Lee or something like that--was just arriving for her shift and stopped to give a lecture to the girls about how dangerous it is lean over a dog they don't know. According to her, at least, dogs will jump up and bite people if they feel crowded, so it's actually pretty dangerous to do that if you don't know the dog very well. Throughout this lecture, the girls continued to say how pretty they thought the dog was. The end of the conversation, which lasted well over 50 seconds, concluded with

Jo Lee/Jolie/etc: Just be careful and don't lean over dogs you don't know in the future.
Girl #1: He really is pretty.
Girl #2: Yeah, real pretty.

This made me think a little bit about listening. I don't know how J however her name is spelled felt about her interaction with these two young women, but my impression was that those two little punks didn't listen to a word she said. Anyway, ultimately, my point here is to say that if you have a conversation with a person and they're still saying absolutely nothing other than what they were saying at the start of the conversation, chances are that they weren't listening to a single freakin word you just said to them.

This is important because I have occasionally fallen victim to bad listeners and more often been a bad listener in the past. It's something to work on; being a good listener is something I've prided myself on and is definitely the best skill a man can have.

Luckily, since this is a blog, I probably don't need to feel bad about doing a terrible job of making a point here. But I will try to think of something inspirational to say just cause...hmmm...

"To end a sentence with a preposition, that is a thing up with which I shall not put!"
-Supposedly said by Winston Churchill, but there are a lot of variations on this one and no one knows when he may have said it, so it's probably just a made up line.

It's Hard to Hold a Candle in the Cold November Rain, but it's a great time for holding a mug!

Hello!

November is the best month for hot chocolate.

Now that I have your attention, I should probably back up that bold assertion.

Most people think that winter is the time for hot chocolate. The chocolate fills your tummy up--which feels especially great in the winter--and the hot makes you warm all over, which contrasts magnificently with the cold of the season. While I certainly agree with these sentiments and think that hot chocolate is great during the winter, the simple fact of the matter is that the flavor, consistency, warmth, and radiant good-feeling you get from drinking hot chocolate is a perfect match and complement for the colors, smells, activities, and general mood of late autumn. A golden/orange/red season like late autumn deserves a rich and robust drink like hot chocolate! Autumn conjures up recollections of a year well-lived, or sadness overcome, or warm and pleasant times gone by, or just a satisfied reminiscence of finality to the year before the hectic holidays befall us, or one last pleasant day before bundling up and away for the wintry end of the year. In short, the feeling you get from late autumn is just like the feeling you get from drinking a cup of hot chocolate before you go home for the night to end your day and go to bed. With marshmallows!

Unfortunately, I have not actually had a cup of hot chocolate at all in the last year. I think I may have to remedy that tonight.

Introduction

Good afternoon folks!

In this, the next logical step in my gradual descent into egregious narcissism, I will be bringing you periodic--and likely very frequent--updates regarding thoughts, observations, happenings, and goings-on from my life. The goal, ultimately, is to explain my thoughts and feelings about various things that I encounter in the course of, you know, life in the hopes of imparting some...thing to the world. Hopefully I will be able to share these random musings with folks so they'll be able to have an idea of what interests me in case they get a hankering to have a conversation with me.

There are a few housekeeping matters that I would like to discuss. First, the title is entirely misleading. Several months ago, a friend of mine suggested that I should start a blog called "Dinner and a Movie with Alex Owings" because, at the time, I would regularly go out for dinner, see movies, and then give her an exhaustive explanation of my thoughts concerning the restaurants and movies I went to. Now, however, I very rarely see movies, and I have not eaten what would traditionally be considered a "dinner" in over two months. However, I still liked the name, so I decided to go with it. Also "dinner and a movie" is the traditional first date and I figured that if I showed this blog to any woman I was interested in then she'd have an idea of the sort of person I am and whether I am the sort of man she'd be interested in...thereby obviating the need for a traditional first date. Although I guess if I really liked a girl and said "hey, go check out my blog" chances are she'd immediately start by thinking "he's not the sort of man I'd be interested in"...so, yeah, I probably won't actually be telling women I'm interested in to look at this blog on the principle that that's a pretty lame way to flirt.

Also, my posting name is Office JD. That's supposed to be a pun on House, M.D. Cause he's House...and I'm Office...and he was a M.D. and I'm a J.D. ...? Heh...heh heh heh... Whoever you are, I hate you for not even cracking a smile at that.

More to come...