Just the facts, Ma'am.

Have you ever been surprised at how someone famous looks in real life? Now I haven't seen too many celebrities, and I'll be honest... sometimes I'm happy about that - but the people that I know that have seen movie stars say they're a lot shorter than they think. Skinnier too. 

I have seen my fair share of musicians live, though, and I'll tell you something - I find them much taller than I assumed they would be. Ben Gibbard (puts on a great show) is a very tall man. I was impressed! I saw Harvey Danger last month (another amazing show) and found the lead singer, Sean Nelson, to be a Goliath of a man. 

It's funny how the movies blow up tiny people to larger-than-life silver screen and music takes these large people and big sounds and squeezes them into a CD or even a sound file. 

On another note, of all the "You suck and need to change" reality shows out there, I feel that "Nanny 911" is the best. Other shows are about outward style or appearance, but this show says "seriously, things need to change or your life is going to suck for... you know... ever." 

The Future Sucks.

So I had an interesting conversation with my mother the other day and I decided to take all of the points and talk about them here and treat them as my own. Don't worry, I'll expand on them, so there's some justifiable ownership. 

Technology, these days, seems to be a terrible two edged sword with very little middle ground to stand on without the proper attitude. But then again, who's to say there is a right attitude toward this kind of thing? Perhaps only Gringox, the Norse god of Technology, but since he doesn't exist outside the furthest reaches of my imagination, we really don't have an appropriate judge for this kind of thing. But what kind of thing am I talking about?

Well it's the basic idea that so much technology allows for all kinds of communication with people that you might never have the chance to talk to, or at least not as often. If it weren't for things like facebook, there would be no way for me to leave messages for my friends in Southern California, Boulder, Colorado, and London, England in one night. There would me no way for me to call a friend on a whim and ask if they want to go see a movie right then and there if we both happen to not be at home near a land-line telephone. I wouldn't be able to send all kinds of messages to all kinds of people getting all kinds of results through that giant beast known simply as 'the e-mails', which, as legend has it, is the love child of Gringox, the Norse god of Technology and Sheeloth, the Greek god of Postal Delivery. We try to forget about their other, more ugly child 'the faxes'

With all of these amazing benefits comes perhaps an even more devastating list of crappy attributes (*Credit here to my mom). Facebook, e-mail, myspace (who still uses that besides out-of-date high schoolers?), whatever pick of the techno poisons you please allow for a terrible feeling of neglect from the world. I know I feel pretty crappy when no one comments on my wall, no one calls my cell phone, and I don't even get a spam e-mail from Netflix. Back in the olden days, between building cars with crowbars and pieces of coal and growing crops out of nothing but dust and snow, no one was whining like me that they didn't get a text message. Life went on, people found each other when they wanted to find each other. 

Text messaging alone is the bane of my existence. Have you ever tried to flirt via text message? It's hard. There's no tone to what you say. I can't even fit in more than 120 characters in a message, forcing me to send awkward half-thoughts or reduce wrds 2 dub lil things lik dis ;). No thanks. I didn't spend years watching Sesame Street to throw out everything I learned about spelling and language to cram garbage into my phone. 

And how do you end a text conversation? If they don't text back, I'm left in this dizzying spiral of thoughts like: "Was I too much? Is she mad? Is she ignoring me? Was she trying to read what I was saying while driving a car and now she had collided with the eternal after colliding with a truck and I AM RESPONSIBLE??!?!" Then she texts later, am I'm like, "Well she made me wait, so I'll text back when I want to." I hate it.

So I guess you should call or text me so I don't feel so pitiful whenever I look at my cell phone. 

I'm kidding, I don't feel pitiful, I just needed a clever ending line. So, uh... keep reading, dear readers. 

The Beauty of it All!

Imagine, if you will, sitting in a room.

Suddenly, you feel as if your soul is filling up. It seems that while sitting in this room, you soul has begun to take on more than its fair share of beauty. It builds and grows, the rounded corners of your soul filling up and starting to stretch past their capacity, then suddenly, in a magnificent cataclysmic explosion, your soul is blown apart in glory. The pieces are then picked up and sown back to perfection by the loving hand of God himself. 

That was my Easter Morning. 

Then I went to work, and work was okay.  

moving on

So the worst part about the loneliness of the night shift here at the hotel are the strangers that interrupt it. 

Right now I'm watching 'Paprika' while I sit here. I really like this movie. 

This post is completely random and badly written, but it doesn't matter, I'm the only one who will see it. 

My eyes are tired. Enjoy your day. 

Tonight in the Hotel

There was a large and loud group of men who smelled pretty bad heating up large amounts of food and drinking soda and barking at each other between guffaws at a crude late night comedy show in the lobby. It was two-thirty in the morning. 

A woman asked me to call her a cab, and when it arrived, she was no where to be found. I suspect abduction. From the government. Of aliens. 

Someone propped open the first-floor side door. For all I know, they snuck in a very quiet dragon. 

A young man, very drunk off of the St. Patrick's Day revelry, wanted a room to "pass out in" at four thirty in the morning, and was frustrated when I told him the cheapest we had was around $120.00, and paying cash he would have to add a $100.00 deposit, and he would have to leave by 11.00 a.m. I almost shouted: "Top 'o the mornin' to you, ya drunk Nancy boy!" at the top of my lungs as he left. But I didn't. 

The folks in room 111 complained about the folks in room 211 about being loud at four-thirty in the morning. I sympathized, they have little kids in there. I called 211 and told them to be quiet, and they defended saying that they were just making normal "getting ready" noises. I told them I didn't give a crap, it was four-thirty in the morning, and the rest of the world doesn't get ready at four-thirty in the morning, so they needed to shut up. I was much more polite, of course, and never lost my temper. 

And that was the eight hours you were asleep. 

I like this poem of mine

So this is my latest poem. Special writing assistance props to my friends Kelly, Richard, and Nichole. They were sitting at the table helping me list intimacies. And that's the name of the poem - 'Intimacies'. 

'Intimacies' 

by Kyle Reardon

Breath

/Holding someone's toothbrush/when she borrows your scarf and wraps it around and around on bare skin/sitting down on their floor/knowing his grandmother just died/

In the darkness under your skin the pink balloons in your chest slowly fill and empty

/Picking up their dog's poop/comfortable silence/comfortable sounds/laughing at an inside joke/close cushion room/plate sharing/shopping opinions/

Inside the tiny tubes wrapped around your bones warm blood slides down and up

/Knowing about moles you've never seen/teasing/making food/conversations on awkward topics/finding a hair and knowing who's it is/satisfactory anger/

Tendons curl their vines around your reddish parts

/Hair adjustments/honesty/sharing fears/knowing your middle name/

Breathing

/And socks/

Submarines that have nothing to do with Sandwiches

I would like to begin with an apology for my last post, in which I used "it's" when it clearly should have been "its". Please forgive me. 

So I'm sitting here watching "U-571" with my dad, and I'm thinking back. I once went through a brief yet passionate love affair with submarine movies. "U-571", "The Hunt for Red October", and my favorite of all, "Das Boot". Yup, there's something about submarines that really gets to me. It's probably the fact that I can't think of anything more frightening than being on a submarine that is getting the poop depth-charged out of them. And don't forget, who doesn't love to hear people yelling things like, "Dive! Dive! Dive!" and "200 meters?! Captain, that's suicide!" I love it anyway. 

I once did a report on submarines in I think seventh grade. If I remember correctly, they were first put into place back during the U.S. Civil War. But this isn't a history lesson, oh no!

Try and imagine yourself as the first financier of this crazy contraption, the inventor nervously pitching you the plan. 

"I've got this idea," he says to you, an eager look in his eyes. He claps his and rubs them together. "Get this. We take a bunch of metal, stick some people in it, and drop it underwater, and then they can shoot stuff at boats or whatever. Whadaya say?"

Be you male or female, you stroke your well groomed mutton chops deep in thought, and ask: "So, like a boat that floats right under the water?"

"No, no," he replies, "More like a metal sausage filled with explosives that you fill parts with water and let it sink to about one hundred feet!"

"Ah, I see! Well, by all means, go to it!" 

 And that, I assume, is how the first submarine was created. 

Decades later, of course, someone else came around with the idea of filling them with nukes. So next time you eat a metal hot dog, think back to that first submarine. 

The Beginning

I started a livejournal, but as I looked at it, I realized that this blogger-thing had a bit more legitimacy in its air. Let's be honest, livejournal is so high school. 

I'm not too sure why I'm writing in this space, perhaps simply to get into the practice of actually writing things for people to read. Also, forgive me, but I never - never read peoples' blogs, so I might be very bad at this. I have no experience. 

Sure, sure... we'll go with that and keep rolling anyway. 

Have you ever watched television past three a.m. voluntarily? I have and boy is it a time! A good time at that! Even, dare I say it? A great time. Where else can you see the entirety of your civilization dump all of it's most shameful acts, from the worship of faded celebrities to enthralling tales of murder and murder and some more murder to reality competitions containing people who are very talented but completely un-famous due to their uncanny ability to wear out the human soul with their personalities?  

Look no further that late night/early morning TV, my friends. normally these kinds of shows are always on, but it seems like either one or the other is on, with decent programming mixed in with the rest, but once three a.m. rolls around, pull out the urine-stained red carpet. 

So I was praying tonight, and I prayed for my future, and I said, "God, I hope that the future works out..." or other things that are much too personal for this space and not personal enough for prayer, and I got to thinking. What does the future hold for me? If I adhere to the Openness Model of God, then even He is not positive about it (the future), and that is a choice that He has made, to work in partnership with me to create and live the best life possible that he would want for me. It was a liberating and frightening collision of thought. If God is as open as I believe He is, then the future is not written, He only has some ideas of what should be done with my life to make the biggest impact for Him. 

Suddenly I was terrified, if this kind of thinking was correct, than my prayers actually meant something. They weren't just ramblings to a being who had decided what's going to happen no matter what I shout His way, but they become an instrumental tool in steering what's next for my life, where things actually go. It's a scary thought, that your prayers might have much more power than you ever anticipated. 

Phrases that I had heard for so long suddenly lost much of their meaning: "There's a girl out there for you, Kyle, God's already picked her out!" Something I have heard so many times after a rather Emo venting or two - I suddenly saw so many problems with it. (This is of course, just an example.) The misogynistic idea that a woman has been "picked for me" aside, I started to think that if God had chosen a woman for me to marry and vise-versa, wouldn't she have a choice? What if one of us just decided not to marry the other? Does that mean God would sit around in Heaven saying, "Puppy barf and moldy sandwiches! Come on, guys, this has already been decided!" 

Or - with this idea of effective prayer - will the interaction between me and God on a subject like this be more along the lines of: "God, I would love to find someone to spend some time with and then maybe marry eventually when we have both matured and aren't just horny young people looking for some guilt-free nooky" [that's not how I pray, I just wanted to elaborate the idea that I'm not praying for a Mrs. just yet] to which God would reply, "Hey, that sounds pretty good. I have some ideas, but let's go at this together and see how things develop." Personally, I like the sound of this plan better. 

Well enough rambling! 

On a side note, sometimes I want to fly to Europe, give someone a thousand dollars, and say: "I'll give you another five-thousand if you can catch me" and then just book it across the continent. Too many Jason Bourne movies, I guess.