In an attempt to provide some more regular content on here I decided I would start at least this one continual series.  There is this site called “Yourmusic.com” that Chris introduced me to awhile back.  Basically you fill up a queue and then they send you a CD from the queue once a month for $6.99.  At the time Chris told me about it I thought it was kind of an interesting idea, but didn’t think much about it after that.  Over the past year I found myself adding any number of CD’s to my Amazon wish list that I came across and decided this year I’d go ahead and do the Yourmusic thing as a way to pick up some of those random discs and whittle down that wish list for relatively cheap.

Well the first disc I got was Daft Punk’s “Alive 2007.”  I had been eyeing this thing since it came out, so for $6.99 I decided it was time to get it.  This was probably what pushed me over the edge to join Yourmusic in the first place.  As the name slightly insinuates, this is a live disc.  Apparently Daft Punk puts on a pretty amazing show, especially for two guys dressed up as robots.  Here is a taste.  The disc itself is pretty good.  12 tracks with roughly two of their songs mixed together on each track.  Basically it’s a Daft Punk DJ Mix of Daft Punk songs mixed by Daft Punk.  While some of the songs on their studio CD’s tend to get a little repetitive, the live mixes tend to change up enough to keep it interesting.

I remember hearing them for the first time way back in college.  My roommate Josh had their “Homework” CD and was listening to the single “Da Funk.”  Like Yourmusic, I didn’t think too much about it at the time.  It wasn’t until I heard “One More Time” a few years later that I was hooked.  I don’t recall exactly where I heard it first.  Probably on WKNC 88.1.  I absolutely LOVE that song.  Every time I hear it I’m compelled to listen.  “One More Time” led me picking up their “Discovery” CD. Later I got “Homework”, “Human After All”, and now “Alive 2007.”  “Discovery” is by the far the best of the bunch with “Alive 2007″ coming in at 2nd.

Since everyone has had something to say this election season for better or worse I thought I would drop a little something into the mix.  Not any opinions on the candidates or the issues, though.  Those have been written about, argued about, and beaten to death for me at this point.  Really, I don’t care that much for politics in general.  That being said, I did go vote.

I vote at the fire station up the street from my house which is within walking distance.  Sadly it was raining, so I ended up just driving there on my way to work this morning.  It wasn’t too crowded at around 7am and apparently not many folks with last names starting with “A-H” were up and at it this morning so that helped speed things along.  I got my ballot and as I was standing there looking around I thought how rudimentary it all seemed.  We live in an age of seemingly unlimited technology and yet I’m getting ready to fill in bubbles on a scantron sheet.

That was the first thought that went through my head, but the second was the one that had the stronger effect on me.  As I continued to look around while waiting for a spot to open where I could fill out the ballot I had this thought or feeling that’s kind of hard to put into words.  Here I was in this fire station with all these strangers I’ve never seen before (with the exception of my neighbor), yet there was this spirit of community.  I had this momentary nostalgic flash of being in a small town where maybe I did know all these people and we’d be seeing each other later at the store or the church potluck.

Sure I do other things surrounded by strangers like shop at the mall or eat at a restaurant, but this was different.  Regardless of who we were voting for, everyone was united in this same task of doing something that works to effect something greater than each of us.  It wasn’t about the devisiveness and other junk that’s been so prevelant in the campaigning leading up to this point.  It was about people looking to make a difference and doing their part to accomplish it.  In an age and nation that pushes individualism so hard, it was refreshing to be ever so slightly reminded of what genuine community feels like.

Sometimes it’s the little things that are the most amusing.  I generally listen to iTunes at work on shuffle and recently I noted something odd when a song came on.  I felt like I had heard part of it recently, but knew I hadn’t heard that particular song.  What came on was this and what I had heard earlier was this (giant robots = awesome).  OK, done listening?  Anyway, while this was not a new revelation to anyone else in the world, I had not up until that point gotten the connection.  It is probably just as well since realizing it on my own brought that similar feeling as that of going to see a movie with a great twist that totally blindsides you at the end.  After checking the credits on “X&Y” I noticed that the songwriting credits for “Talk” listed the last names of members from both bands.  And there is your fun musical trivia for the day.

P.S. As a bonus I’ll leave you with this.  And when you’re done watching go read this.

I’ve been around.  I’ve been in Boone.  I’ve been at work…a lot.  Overall, though, I’ve been somewhere I definitely do not want to go back to.  Apparently like a lot of other people around me, I’ve been fairly depressed.

A little background for everyone:  It began when my hopelessly romantic self finally asked the most beautiful girl I had ever seen to go do something.  Things were seemingly all good at first, but after having “the talk”, being relegated to “let’s be friends and see where it goes”, hopefully holding out that it might go somewhere, then quickly realizing that it in fact was not, I became rather disheartened.  After conferring with various friends about the ridiculousness of the situation I finally asked her where things were at knowing full well what the response was going to be.

Having asked her where things are at after 3 months of vain pursuit and getting the “Just friends” response this is really where the dam kind of broke open.  Now this isn’t the first time my interest has been handed back to me.  It’s not even the first time I’ve dealt with someone who’s brain and actions don’t seem to want to sync up so that when they say they want to be friends they actually act like it.  It was, though, the first time things had affected me as negatively as they did.  As I began to think over things and look back at the situation I became frustrated at how little effort and interest it seemed the girl of my affections put forth.  And this is just being friends, mind you.  How hard is that?  Go to the mall, get something to eat, go for a walk, etc.  It really boils down to spending time together and creating some unique shared experiences.  This was apparently not too high on her priority list of things to do, at least not with me from what I could gather.  And I say this fully aware that I am a total slacker friend the majority of the time.  In my mind, though, this was part of what made it so irritating because I knew I was going way above and beyond my usual efforts just to spend time with her.

I was left feeling like I wasn’t interesting or enjoyable enough to even be friends with.  Now on some level I knew this was silly because I have plenty of great people around me I know enjoy spending time with me, but this provided little reassurance now that the flood of sorrow was unleashed.  Add to that my noticing how in the past year it seemed like anyone who could get a date was practically engaged or married in the same amount of time I’d spent pursuing a dead end. The result was a downward spiral to the point where I felt like someone had just taken a dump on my soul.  I always used to see those commercials for Zoloft and think how odd they were with those sad looking cotton balls, but now I was beginning to realize how accurate they really are because that’s how I felt: like a sad ball of fluff.

Adding to the trauma was my church starting a series on Ecclesiastes.  While I’m sure many people have read Eccesiastes, I would doubt a lot of folks have studied it at great length.  Mostly because it starts itself out to be the most depressing book in the Bible.  Life is meaningless.  In the end everyone meets the great equalizer, Death, and all of our accomplishments, relationships, etc. fade away into nothing.  A guy who had basically unlimited resources and pursued all the things that we think will somehow make our lives better and happier only to find that none it really did really puts life into perspective.  I’d highly recommend anyone check out the talks Tyler has given on it.  Enough shilling.

So I’ve become trapped in this endless loop of self-pity that is depression.  I feel bad about things in my meaningless life, realize the somewhat ridiculous nature of my feeling bad about these things, realize that other people I know have things much more difficult going on their lives like leukemia or miscarriages, and somehow end up feeling not better, but worse.  Cycle completed, now repeat.

By now you’re probably asking, “Why didn’t you talk to somebody? You’ve got friends, lean on them.”  That was really part of the problem, though.  I was questioning the validity of these relationships and my place in them.  I was tired of hearing how I was nice, funny, etc. from everyone.  If I was so rad, why was it so difficult to get one girl to notice this.  If all I was in the end was the court jester providing comic relief I just wanted to forget about it all.  Your next statement being, “Well if not your friends, then go talk to a therapist or something.”  The problem there was that I felt like no one really cared all that much and if the people in your life who should be helping and caring for you for free aren’t then why pay someone to do the same?  Yes, this really is the logic I had going.  Like I said, it’s a loop of self-pity where excuses and justification become the norm no matter how incredibly stupid and illogical they are.

The other place I turned was to God asking, “Why?” I had kind of been doing this all along, but felt like there wasn’t much of response.  In making my way slowly through the Old Testament I had just finished Leviticus.  I decided to jump over to Psalms instead of diving into Numbers.  I figured there would be more for me in there given where I was at the time.  In reading through them I found relatable comfort in David’s cries out to God.  There is definitely a wide gamut of emotions in that book.  In the end, though, it felt more like a band-aid of sorts than a lasting solution.  I wanted to be through all of this garbage in my life.  I know things like this take time, but I wanted the immediate miraculous solution from God.

I was tired of muddling my way through the week only to have just the sight of my rejector at church shove me back down into my pit of failure and sorrow.  Mondays were terrible having played the loop of depression on Sunday in fast forward.  To accentuate the powerful effect of all this and show maybe just how pathetic I had become, watching 90210 was enough to almost bring me to tears since the lead actress reminded me of a certain someone.  The tears could also have been from the fact that the show is really pretty bad, but enough of a trainwreck that I can’t help but keep on watching.

Also contributing to things was the fact that work was really busy during all of this.  I’ve probably worked as much overtime in the past 4 months as I have in the other 7 years I’ve been at my job combined.  A brief rest from this was getting to go to Boone on homecoming weekend.  Got to hang out with friends, eat some tasty food, enjoy the great weather, etc.  I wasn’t expecting too much other than getting away and having good times that weekend, but in hindsight some of this may have been a set up for a spike.

I don’t care a whole lot for football, so I hadn’t planned on going to the game on Saturday.  My Plan A of hanging out with the Pipers got nixed when they ended up going to Puerto Rico for work.  Plan B was to cruise around town or go get some coffee and read.  I thought I was going to get to go back to Plan A with Nicki, but she ended up not coming.  I didn’t fully realize this until probably Saturday morning when she still hadn’t arrived.  So it was back to Plan B except that I hadn’t brought anything to read given I didn’t think I would have any time or need for it.  Well Kenan had that book by Tim Keller “The Reason for God” up there with him.  His church is apparently having a class that is going through it like Vintage.  I was mildly intrigued by it given that it covered a lot of things I was thinking about at the time.  So I took that with me to Espresso News to read during the game.  I made it about halfway through that day and maybe another quarter by the time we left on Sunday.  It was honestly a lot better than I thought it was going to be.  Is it something anyone should read?  Yes.  Does it give definitive answers to the hard questions?  Not really, but no book will.  I’m not going to say it’s the best book I’ve ever read or that it will change anyone’s life that sits down and reads it, but Tim Keller makes a lot of good points and provides a lot of food for thought.

Anyway, while the book didn’t change my life drastically or anything, it did ease some of the turmoil in my brain.  Which was good because the next week is where I pretty much bottomed out.  Like I said, work had been pretty busy and the week after homecoming was probably the worst.  I spent everyday working 8 hours, leaving long enough to go feed the cats and myself, then coming back for another 4-5 hours.  All total I ended up working around 64 hours that week.  Just by Wednesday I felt like a zombie.  Seeing how the week before had been similar, it’s probably really good I had an out of town excursion to break up the two.  Every night I got home no earlier than 10:30 completely exhausted with no desire for anything other than to go to sleep.  No TV, no reading, no prayer, no nothing.  By the end of the week I was done.  Physically, emotionally, and spiritually done.  I really felt like I might just die at any given moment I was so out of it.  It was at that point that I just said, “Okay God, you win.”

I didn’t have anything crazy happen.  I wasn’t expecting anything at all really.  I did feel better, though.  Over the next couple of days it was like the cloud or veil was being lifted as I began to realize a number of things while I thought back over the past few months.  That’s when I realized the infinite loop I had been in and that it hadn’t really started with as much as just overtaken me due to the events I mentioned in the beginning. I began to realize how I’d really been putting far too much stock and hope into the possibility of a relationship that it was unknowingly kind of a driving force in my life.  I also began to see how we really have only two places to focus our attention: inwardly and outwardly.  Depression hones our focus inwardly more that it usually already is.  Trying to focus it outwardly becomes very difficult and even when we think we’ve done that it often times is really just another self-serving, self-gratifying end.  I realized that my expectations for how things should work and how people should act only led me to being disappointed and hurt which pushed me into being bitter and angry.

So where does that leave me?  Trying to look forward.  Trying to look towards Jesus and follow Him.  I’m always a bit reluctant to make such a statement mostly because it inevitably sounds “religious”, but it’s true.  In thinking about Ecclesiastes, I know from experience what it says in there is wisdom.  I could have looked to try any number of things to bring some sort of fulfillment into my life.  At some point inevitably I will still unknowingly (or maybe knowingly) try to, but if a guy who could (and did) have any of the things I want in life like entertainment, good food, a relationship with any woman I want, plenty of money, etc. couldn’t find lasting appeal and purpose in them why should I arrogantly think that I somehow can?  Really, how can any of us think that?  I can’t say that I’m over everything.  I still dread the thought of seeing her and the possibility of having my heart melt in any number of ways good and bad.  I can, however, watch 90210 without welling up these days.

That’s really it in a nutshell.  I may or may not expand on some of the thoughts mentioned.  I do have a number of things I feel like I can write on these days (most of which are not quite so heavy), so hopefully I’ll get around to posting and keep some people entertained a little more.  I can be kind of a lazy self-centered jerk and the past few months has really only amplified that quality.  If I’ve been out of touch or just out of it in general with folks I apologize.  If anyone wants to talk about any of this feel free to ask me or if anyone wants to talk about any of their issues I’m more than happy to listen.  The worst thing I did was believe the idea that I had no one to talk to because no one really cared.