Just a thought... but that's what blogs are for!

I love being able to talk to people about random stuff whenever I want and be presented with the illusion that someone is listening.

I was at a little league baseball game today and one of the coaches walked by the bleachers talking to a kid who was helping ump the game. The kid pointed out that his dad was the umpire behind the plate, and the coach said something to the effect of, "Hey, whoa, what, I, uh, didn't even... yeah, hey!"

It was the ultimate verbal fumble. Good thing he didn't coach football. I do it all the time, of course, but at that moment I thought to myself, "Wouldn't things run a lot more smoothly if everybody said exactly what they were trying to say?" Basically, wouldn't it be better if everyone did NCFCA or something equivalent? I mean, think of how much time we could save, how much miscommunication we could avoid if everyone communicated perfectly.

But then I started listening to a conversation between a few kids who were practicing their swings. It was so cool! They were talking about absolutely nothing and getting on each other's collective nerves, but wow. I started tuning into the conversations around me one at a time, drinking in the completely unique combinations of words.

Most of them had been made before, but the pauses, the inflections, the pitches (no baseball pun intended) - it was like music. Words are like music, really. That's why I love being a writer. Coming up with new ways to say things is so much fun.

I thought of a better way to say all of this last night, but I didn't have time to complete and post this.

Sometimes I wish God had put a "Save" button on our heads so that we could keep a record of all of our thoughts and share them with others exactly as they came to us, before getting muddled and half-forgotten at best. My blog posts would be so much more interesting and so much more honest. They would actually reflect the things I was thinking.

The written word is great, but there's something about the spontenaity of human conversation (or at least the potential for spontenaity) that's fascinating and an incredibly complex result of God's infinite creativity. There may be no original thought, but original sentences are still thriving. I'll prove it to you:

Candles in pheremones; torque your inward purples.

See? No one's ever said that before. I made sure of it by pluralizing purple.

I don't think I've ever made the most of a day. I don't think I've actually ever lived a day as if it were my last... except maybe 9/11. I was seriously certain that the world was going to end that morning. The great thing is that God is so merciful. Today he gave us another day, another chance. Hopefully he'll give us another one tomorrow, because I almost completely wasted this one.

I was thinking about that and I recorded this. 30-second folk renditions of praise songs based on Bible verses FTW!

Download Andrew Cass - This Is The Day

The survey says...

According to Googlism, a fun site I just discovered, I am a lot of things I didn't know about. Google Fight is fun, but you can't really post about it in a blog. Googlism, though, is mad quotable. So here are a few facts about Andrew:

Andrew is a hot tan stud.

I love Googlism.

Andrew is a hit with the ladies in Chile.

So undeniably true.

Andrew is a wonderful and dedicated teacher.

Andrew is involved in a number of charity organizations.

Andrew is a public servant.

Andrew is cool.

Andrew is beautiful.

Andrew is the best.

Andrew is basically a perfect creature.

Yes, yes, yes.

Andrew is a Springsteen fan with a fascination of aquatic and marine life.

Um...

Andrew is in the confederate flag.

What!?

Andrew is the costliest natural disaster to date.

You've got the wrong Andrew!

Andrew is your single source for complete antenna repair.

Still the wrong one.

Andrew is a working hairdresser at the cutting edge of his industry.

Nope... well, maybe someday. And now, some examples of outdated information on the web that proves Schulyer Wolf's persuasive correct.

Andrew is 1 month old.

Andrew is 11 months old.

Andrew is 9 years old.

Andrew is 11.

Andrew is 13.

You're close, keep going!

Andrew is 24.

Wait, no...

Andrew is 40.

Oh, please stop. That hurts.

Andrew is approximately 319.

You're way off track now.

Andrew is a champ.

That's more like it.

Andrew is waxing megalomaniacal again.

Sorry.

Andrew is either very optimistic or very naive.

You're right, you're right.

Andrew is blatantly dishonest.

All right, I deserved that.

Andrew is evil.

I'm trying to change.

Andrew is graduating.

Oh, you had to bring that up.

Andrew is still not sure what the future holds.

You're telling me.

Andrew is an able speaker.

Well, there is that.

Andrew is nationally renowned for his rich warm voice.

I don't know if I'd go that far. Nationals isn't until June, anyway.

Andrew is designed and intended to glorify God.

Wow. Wow, Googlism, that is really profound. Thank you for reminding me.

I start out trying to goof off and and I'm reminded by a search engine of a timeless spiritual truth. God is really working lately. Of course, he's been working the whole time, but I'm just beginning to open my eyes.

I picked the perfect time to start blogging!

Why?

Because I'm so emotional lately.

Why?

Because of everything that's happened to me lately.

Why?

You ask a lot of questions, buddy.

To put it in a nutshell that it does not deserve and that cannot possibly contain everything that has transpired within the last few years to bring me to this point... God has been doing a lot in my life. It came to a head during senior speeches at Regionals, and, in typical God fashion, it came to a second head last night.

I invited about a dozen people to come judge at the NCFCA Regional Tourney, and only one of them actually came - my youth pastor, Jared. He's awesome, and I knew he'd come. He was only able to come the last day, though, so he didn't have to judge. So he followed me around for hours as I went back and forth from room to room, supposedly to compete in three different events at once. (Remember when Mrs. Hudson talked about how nobody was going to have to do that? I was the "maybe one" person she conceded to.) It took forever and a round, but I finally got through all of my events and Jared was able to see all of them.

After watching my dramatic, he caught me outside the room and told me he would like me to perform it on Sunday night after he gave the message. A chance to take my skillz outside of competition? Yes, thanks! So I did. After I finished, Jared came back up onto the stage and I could see tears in his eyes. "Every time I see that speech..." he began.

My initial reaction was, "Yeah! I got somebody to cry!" I know that shouldn't always be the goal of a DI, but I consider it a great acheivement whenever I, a funnyman, get people all emotional.  I was feeling mighty fine until I heard the words that followed from my pastor's mouth:

"...I think, there are so many people out there who are more broken than I am."

It wasn't about me. Not one bit. Suddenly I felt smaller than small. Suddenly I wasn't even there. Then people started turning towards me and clapping for my performance. Oh, come on. Don't do that. Don't even start.

I understood a little bit more what God wants me to do. In that room, no one was critiquing my speaking. Nobody was checking my memorization or judging my characterizations. They were simply drawn into the story, and God was speaking to them through my words and my actions. People started thinking about the thing I always had to remind myself I was speaking about - the persecuted church.

Jared wasn't crying because of what a moving speech I had given. He was crying because of what I was speaking about. God had used me and I hadn't even realized he was doing it. I was too busy thinking about how I was "moving up" and "expanding" and how God had "opened a door". I hadn't even considered why God had opened the door. I assumed it was so people could marvel at the fantabulous communication skills I had honed for the past 5 years. Nope. God had opened a door for an infinitely more important reason.

So God is working in me, and when he works in me I get emotional, and when I get emotional. Hence the post.

I've been wondering, what's wrong with emotion? Being a teenager, I know I'm a little biased right now. But the only danger I can see in emotion with our relationship with God is that we can start seeking him for the emotion, or, to put it a different way, we can start getting emotional for the sake of how cool it feels to get emotional. Goosebumps, et cetera. But emotions, at least for some of us, follow naturally from a true love relationship. It can also be an outward sign of that relationship to a world wondering why we're different. It shouldn't be the only sign, but it's a valid one, I think.

What do you feel is your biggest area of strength?

I'm filling out a job application right now and that's the question I have to answer in roughly two lines of text. Oh, please. I'm already skipping questions and planning to go back to them later. You have to ask this question!

Am I strong in any area? I'm funny, sometimes, with the right people if I'm on a roll. I don't think that's what they're looking for, and it would be pretty sad if that was my biggest strength. But I've got to put something down. I don't see the point of asking such a roundabout question. They don't actually want to know what my biggest strength is, they just want to gauge my response. But if I answer honestly and say my biggest strength is honesty, what do they do with that? In order to be effective, the question really requires some dishonesty. But in that way it's completely self-defeating.

I think I may be reading too much into this question. I tend to do that with applications. My answers are often overly complex and tell little about me except that I am eager to please and read too much into their questions. But how can I possibly answer the question and acheive a good result. In all likelyhood, the answer to the question won't hardly factor into their decision at all. But if I go by that logic and give a lousy answer, it will end up affecting their decision.

To be honest, a bunch of qualities instantly spring to mind. But they are instantly shot down because they all refer to how I am around other people. Let's face it, I'm usually a pretty nice guy outside my home. But around the house I can be a monster and frequently am. I yell and sometimes scream at my brothers, talk back to my mom, ignore my dad and get mad over the stupidest things. When someone is annoying me and other people whom I want to impress are watching, I am patient to the nth degree and then some. I have zero patience, however, when no one is around to watch me blow up. I'm caring and compassionate towards my family, my friends, and I have a vague sense of compassion for the world, but I care about myself a quintillion times more.

Let's face it. I'm a self-centered, self-serving, aggressively hateful broken-down machine. But you knew that already, and so did I. I listen to Steriogram. I'm a mess! So we've established that, but let's be real. The people who came up with this application form already knew that too. Why in the heck did they write the question, then? Just to make me further aware of my inadequacy and be spurred to write this?

No, of course not. They put the question in because they were writing a job application form and everyone puts that question in their job application forms. I guess the most honest answer I can give is that I'm compassionate and enjoy helping people. That'll sell me for a teaching position. I just hate applications in general.

Here are some lyrics about getting older. This is how I've been feeling all year and especially this week. Reading these words makes me want to stay up all night and drive down to the oval to feed cripples. Why did I waste so much of my life? Tomorrow I'm going to do something worthwhile, I promise. You hold me to that, okay?

We can't go to sleep

'Cause we'll wake up older,

We can't let these nights

Steal away half our lives.

-Sanctus Real, "Half Our Lives."

Christian's Glasses

My youngest brother's glasses came in today. As you can probably tell, he isn't very happy. We keep telling him that he looks great in them and people will think he's even smarter than he already is, but the change is just too much for him to handle. I can't blame him. At his age, he shouldn't have to deal with that all of a sudden.

Christian's eyesight problems came as a shock to us - we only just found out this month that he's had terrible vision all of his life. I never would have known it, but he's spent all eight years of his life seeing blurry pictures (he completely flunked the vision test... had to guess at the second line of letters). He's always seemed to view things normally, though he always did sit too close to the TV and the computer. We warned him that it would affect his vision, but what we didn't know was that it was already affected and he was compensating. Another reason we didn't realize was that he started reading at an early age and always read very well.

He cried for a long time after the eye doctor told him he would need glasses. He told me after calming down a little that when he picked out his glasses, he just picked a random pair. He didn't care what he had, because he didn't want to wear them. He got angry today after we received them and refused to put them on for a while. I think he looks great in them, but he says he hates how they look. I think what he mostly hates is the fact that he'll have to wear them almost all the time and doesn't have a choice.

I've always thought that glasses were cool and wished I could wear them. In reality, though, I'm sure I would feel restricted just like him. Earlier today, when he refused to put on his glasses (which he is thankfully now getting more used to wearing), God showed me something about my life which I thought was pretty cool. I don't know if you'd call it a silver lining, but it's something positive that's come from Christian's unhappiness.

When Christian first put the glasses on, his eyes weren't corrected right away. In fact, if they're ever 20/20, we don't know when. The doctors are hoping for at least 20/30. So he's really discouraged, because his vision isn't any better and now he's got all these things he has to do to make sure his glasses don't get damaged. He always has to keep the glasses on, and he doesn't get to see the results.

Life as Christian is now analogous to life as a Christian. We strive to be like Christ, but it doesn't happen instantly. It takes time. We don't know when we'll be perfected, and in the meantime we have a bunch of rules we have to follow. Not to mention we have to put on the armor of God and keep it on all the time. We won't see the results of our good works until heaven, but we have to persevere in the hope that one day our vision will be like His: perfect. When our vision lines up with his, all will be right. Just like Christian needs his glasses, we Christians need Christ to help us see.

There's something this analogy doesn't cover, though. Christian doesn't have a relationship with his glasses. However, he does have a relationship with Jesus. Even if his never improved (thank you God, it will), his life would still be preserved for all eternity.


See? He looks great when he smiles. :)

Poodles never get referenced. I'm going to reference them in my title so that they don't feel left out.

Regionals is over. Wow. My goodness. What a trip. Just for me, they made all of the tournaments half a day longer this year. How nice of them. They knew I would want to spend as much time as possible in NCFCA before I graduated and they extended it.

What do you mean, dreaming? I'm awake, and I'm not Martin Luther King Jr. NCFCA loves me, get over it.

No, really, NCFCA has taught me well over 13,000 things, and I had only a few minutes to talk about them on Tuesday night when seniors were asked to give their speeches. What a bummer! I could talk for ages. Hence my blogability. Words are my water. I would say air, but that's not entirely true. Water is a better metaphor, and besides, it's alliterative. Can you tell I just had Mountain Dew?

Enough of that paragraph. Anyways, I had very little time to talk, and I'm not sure I communicated it to the best of my ability. But then again, I accomplished something huge in that short time. I got people to stop talking at their table and ignoring the people who were speaking from their hearts. I used humor to get their attention, and then I kept it so they could hear not only my message, but the messages that the people after me were trying share. For years I've used that idea as justification for doing only humorous speeches, but I've never been sure if I was actually doing it. In effect, that speech was justification for all of my five years in the league. I'm pretty sure if I hadn't given it, I would have felt like a mostly-failure in my NCFCA career. Never had much of an impact, never helped anybody. Thank you, God. You know I needed that. Thank you so much.

And thank you to Mrs. Rossi. Even if the NCFCA board didn't change the length of tournaments just for me, I know she at least changed the length of my speech. She said she would give hand signals (like in impromptu or debate) to keep us from going too long, because everyone wants to hear breaks. And because for the last two years I feel like I've been on her bad side, I was pretty sure she would cut me off right after I opened my mouth. But she just stood there, smiling. I realized it later: she was proud of me. Suddenly, I was sorry for all of the things I'd done that she disapproved of. I wished I could go back and un-disappoint her. But at least here, now, she was proud of me. It was really worth it now. Why did I ever tell myself that the people in charge of NCFCA were too stiff, too concerned with silly rules? They were just trying to help me, right?

Good glory, I'm going to break down in front of the computer. I'm not crying, I'm just... sweating through my eyes. Yeah, that's it. It's a scientific phenomenon known as ocular transpiration.

It may not be that significant to you, but to me it was like, "Yes! My life has meaning! It's not a lot, but it's something! My time in NCFCA touched somebody! YES!! SCORE!!! I was floating on air. That was probably the highlight of the tournament. Making Mrs. Rossi proud.

Is it wrong to want to make people proud? I'd say it isn't, if making them proud means doing what is right. I'd say she has very good principles, so in this case it was good. I'm sorry if I'm going on about this little thing too much, but it's the only reason I'm not unbearably sad today. I'm done competing in Region 10 for good, but I made someone proud of me. I've spent the day wondering about a billion things, but one thing I didn't wonder was whether or not it was worth it. It so was. 

Of shoes and snakes and blameshifting...

I'm at the NCFCA Region 10 Invitational Tournament this week, and last night I was given the relatively simple task of unlocking the car of the family I drove up* with so that I could remove my belongings and place them in the car of the family I would be staying with over the next few days. Simple, right?

• Yes

• No way!

If you selected "Yes," you obviously don't know me. I'm the kind of person who forgets to attach files to emails. Every time. And I've been emailing for about 50% of my natural-born life. I am absentmindedness personified. They say that absentmindedness comes with vast intelligence, so that's what I cling to in moments of massive stupidity. At least I know stuff, even if I don't know where it is!

So I went to the car and got my stuff. Now, I know that I'm a forgetful person, so right after I got my stuff I put the keys in my pocket and swore never to take them out until I got them back to their owner. Of course, that minute the family was ready to take them to my house and I went straight from one car to another. Never gave the keys back.

Enter sinking feeling.

I spent forever being awkward about it and eventually just apologized individually to all of them because their father ended up having to drive up*, get them, and bring them back home for the night. What shocked me, though, personally, was how many excuses I thought of using.

"You said if I LOST them I'd be dead meat! I never lost them! I had them in my pocket the whole time."
"I was just trying so hard not to forget them! You can't blame me for wanting to help."
"Keys? What keys?"

Why is it we blameshift? Blameshifting has been around since Adam and Eve Smith started arguing about who ate what first. Whodunit? Was it the naked guy? Naw, couldn't be him. The naked girl made him eat it. Well, then how about the naked girl? Um...

(Here a lightbulb comes on over Eve's head.)

And thus the phrase was coined, "The Devil made me do it." But why can't we just accept the consequences of what we did? Shouldn't it feel more, I don't know, right to us? Shouldn't it feel like everything's in order? Justice has been served? It has to come down to pride, I guess. I know it does for me. It took me eons to realize it, but that's just how it is. I'm biting my lip as I write this. I do that when I really don't want to say something. Yeah, fine, I'll say it. I just never want to be in the wrong. I never want to be viewed by my peers as a bad person. Thus, the first thing that springs to my bitten lip is invariably an excuse for why it's really not my fault.

Take biting my lip, for instance. Today I was going to go into a round to give an impromptu speech (you draw a random topic and have two minutes to prepare for a five-minute speech on that topic) and was a little nervous, so I bit my lip. Whoops! Blood all over. I bleed profusely, don't ask me why. I guess it has something to do with being filled with blood. Weird things, human beings.

I didn't want to speak for five minutes with red teeth, so I cleaned it up a bit and asked a friend of mine how it looked. Naturally, being the kind, considerate person she was, she wanted to know how I bit my lip. The first thing that popped into my head was some random explanation about accidentally biting down as I did some crazy midair stunt (very likely to happen but completely fabricated in this instance). Why? I didn't want to admit that I was a human being and had flaws, bad habits, et cetera.

So it all stems from pride. What can we do about it? Well, I don't know who you worship, but I can go to God (fyi, that's YHWH, not Allah or anybody else) and ask Him to help me with the issues I try so hard to cover up. First I have to admit that I'm not perfect. That's tough. Then I have to ask Him to remove my pride. Uber tough.

I'm trying to do that this week. Keep an eye on me and let me know how I'm doing, okay? Thank. You're a pal.

-Andrew




*Drive up, drive down, whatever. Does anyone else have this problem? I live at the top of the country, but I always describe myself as driving "up" to a different state. No idea why.

Behold!

I have a playlist on my blog.

I propose another, perhaps simpler response to the question taking residence in my sidebar:

Why not?