Tell Tale

This past Friday Jefe came into town and we played kickball with CCF, then I played football with them for a brief while, then we went to Pullin Park. It was a lot of fun, I'd never been there before. Afterward, Jefe and I went off on our own for a little tour of the heart of Raleigh. We went to the old Capital building where Jefe, upon discovering that the governor's office is still located on the first floor, went into the echo-y stone Rotunda area and said, "O Mr. Eaaaaaasly." Fairly amusing, guess you had to be there.

I had to use the bathroom and so I used a really old one in the lobby. This set my mind in motion. I should use the bathroom in every Capital building in the country. That would be a fantastic life goal.

Saturday I watched the Wolfpack beat ECU, much to my father's dismay and my great joy.

Now I'm back in Raleigh at the ministry center gearing up for a LONG video production period for CCF.

Running Out...

I'm running out of money. I have enough to get me through the month of October, but after that, I have no clue what I'll do to support myself all the way through May. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, I'm open.

Please note: I no longer do professional panda artwork.

Golden Age

Happiness comes wrapped in a frilly white dress accessorized with a veil, a bouquet and a bow on back.
It is almond eyes, glazed with tears of love peering at you from across an antique pulpit.
Happiness is the love that has sealed the marriages of a growing number of my friends and acquaintances. It is the love the will seal many more, now engaged or soon to be. It is the happiness that, for whatever reason, I lost and some other man gained, (and who can blame him?). Happiness, it seems, is just not in the cards for me.

To avoid the obvious temptation I am having to be melancholy and depress everyone, chiefly myself, I will now change the focus. Why is marriage the way to happiness? Sure, having someone is a wonderful thing, but can our happiness not come from something altogether higher? I think that is my case. I won't ponder what, exactly, is in the cards, but I hope it's fantastic. The longer I'm in the post-graduate limbo zone, the more I see myself moving further and further from the American dream. Good thing my kingdom isn't America.

Smelly-Faced

There are some things that you only contemplate while drinking a glass of English Breakfast tea while kneeling down next to your neurotic chihuahua so that she will finally nibble her kibble and eat her supper. Our dog, Maggie, is as sweet as she can be, but she's nervous about everything, including eating by herself. I made myself a plate of steamed veggies for supper and she cowered in the corner just like she always does when anyone is in the kitchen and not paying her attention. I noticed that her food dish was still full when I finished and then I remembered that she likes company when she eats, so I squatted down next to her with my tea and waited for her to start eating. It took a few minutes, but it gave me time to stop and consider what dogs should really be eating. It can't be fun for them to have that dry, tasteless dog food every day. I reached up and grabbed a piece of broccoli. She gave it a few sniffs and, almost reluctantly, began tugging the leafy parts off of the top. Then she pretty much devoured it.

Moral of the story: give your dog some broccoli every now and then.

Before Time Runs Out

David Sherrill, my friend and coworker at Caswell, brought this list into work one day this summer and I asked him to send me a copy of it for my blog once I got back. I'll hold any commentary of my own, it speaks for itself.

List of Things To Do Before Death or Loss of Senses

1. Streak during a professional sporting event
2. Wrestle a Water Buffalo to save a small child's life
3. Survive a shark attack to obtain a really cool scar
4. Build my own plane and learn to fly it
5. Catch a world record Marlin
6. Live in Alaskan wilderness for a year living off the land as the mountain men did
7. Raise Wallabies in Montana on my Turnip Farm (Run a Turnip Farm)
8. Become a Master Hibachi Chef
9. Move to New Zealand for a length of time
10. Build a Log Cabin with hand tools
11. Fly fish in Russia for Brown Trout
12. Base Jump off the Oak Island Bridge
13. Become a Master Cobbler and Silver Smith
14. Ride a Chariot drawn by four White Italian Stallions
15. Build a Dug Out Canoe with hand tools
16. Build a Rocking Chair
17. (if rocking chair and log cabin complete) Sit in hand crafted Rocking Chair on Porch of Cabin built from the sweat of my brow and widdle wood and read books for a solid month...
18. Go through an entire coloring book without coloring outside of the lines
19. Sleep in a Hammock which is hanging from the Statue of Liberty's Torch
20. Raise a Pet Lobster (he shall be called Thaddeus)
21. Find a nice girl and get Married ??????????????? maybe
22. (If not Married) Live in Mongolia with Mongolian Tribesmen learning the ways of the Nomads for 2-3yrs and write a book on my experience...

David Alexander Sherrill

Good Effort...

I have discovered the point at which you know you are athletically inept at whatever sport activity you are attempting. It is at precisely the moment when someone says "good hustle," usually in response to your fowling up a play miserably. This occurred to me the other day when I played Ultimate Frisbee with some of my new NC State friends on the Intramural fields behind the gym. Everyone I played with had played before, and of course I hadn't. As if it weren't enough that I was audibly panting like a mad cow after just five minutes of playing, I made the embarrassing mistake of fumbling a "frisbee touchdown" pass and falling - nay, crashing across the field after tripping up on my own feet.

I appreciate the good sportsmanship of my teammates who managed to remain encouraging while at the same time avoiding passing to me whenever possible. When, finally, they were left with no options but me, (because no one would waste time guarding me), or throwing it to another guy, which would make it obvious that they were avoiding me, they would painfully weigh their options and pass to me. Their semi-good faith was rarely awarded, as I most often managed to fumble even these open, easy passes.

I need to find some frisb-losers to play with.

We Can Work it Out

John Mayer made me reevaluate my life. Ok, that's a wee bit of an overstatement, but going to see him in concert at Walnut Creek this past Wednesday did make me think about how much I've been slacking on my guitar practice, and about a time in my life when John's music was my soul's song. More on that in a minute.

I got a call from JaySun Webb about a week before the show, asking me if I wanted to go with him. His sister and her friends are the type of girls that melt over that kind of thing and they needed a fourth person to get the discounted ticket price. I was hesitant, but in the end I sucked it up and decided to go. The past 3 summers I've thought about going to see him when he comes to Walnut Creek, but every time I've been working at Caswell. I guess I felt like I owed it to the "Nathan Sloan" of years past to go see him since I never could before.

My "fanliness" toward John Mayer is a strange animal. It constantly changes, like the tides. One month, I may think he is the most amazing musician on the face of the planet - the next I brush him off as an arrogant, albeit rightfully so as far as musicianship goes, prick who could use more than a little voice training. In high school, my friend Matt introduced me to "Heavier Things" and I really liked it. Then I grew slightly ashamed of it's regular rotation in my car stereo. I finally packed it into a thick cd case, which got thrown in the back seat and mostly forgotten over the next few years.

It wasn't until Continuum that I really went crazy for his music. The timing couldn't have been more perfect. I had just broken up with a girl, I was miserably lonely, and I had it stuck in my head that I should become a guitarist. Songs like "Slow Dancing in a Burning Room" and "Dreaming with a Broken Heart" quickly became my songs - so easily relatable to the girl problems in my own life. "Heart of life," "In Repair," and "I'm Going to Find Another You" became my anthems. There are two things that make an album great - the fact that it is well written and produced, and the perspective of the person listening to it. A lot of it is in how your emotions vibe with the emotions of the person who wrote it. In the case of Continuum and myself, every single song was good, and most were outstanding.

The style of John Mayer's playing was also a new inspiration to me. When I finally got an electric guitar, it was a Fender Stratocaster, and I'm not ashamed to say that it wouldn't have been had I not loved that album so much. I took guitar study seriously for the first time. In six months I went from playing nothing at all to reading simple music and playing songs that I heard on the radio. It kept rolling and rolling, finally ending when I did the ultimate, (although not the ultimate, ultimate) and learned how to somewhat play his song "Neon." If it were not for John Mayer and my broken heart, I would certainly not be a guitarist today.

What hit me at this concert was how I'd forgotten this debt. In the past year my interests have strayed to other bands and other activities outside of guitar playing. I've put down my six-stringer for days at the time in the interest of goofing off with friends, playing video games, and pursuing other hobbies, (of which, there is a new one every month). Thankfully I recently sold off my xbox to get a new all-tube Fender amp so that's one distraction down, anyway. Since going to this show and being reminded of that time in my life when the blues pulled me through, I took my Strat to a guitar shop last week and it is still there, being set up so that it's ready to play.