on christmas lists, god, and the seahawks

some people hate christmas lists. they hate to write them and they hate to receive them. these people see the christmas list as a failure of knowledge and intimacy. they rightly point out that the purpose of gift-giving isn't to fulfill some need but to provide one another with meaningful tokens of our love and thanks and friendship.

i'm not one of these people. i suppose i'm a christmas list moderate.

i don't eagerly keep a list all year of the things i'd like for christmas and then postmark that list for the north pole on the fourth friday of november. and honestly, i never really know what to put on said list. but if my mom calls me up and asks what i want for christmas, i'll certainly oblige.

and as a giver, i really do want to light upon the perfect gift, the gift that would never find its way onto a christmas list. i want to give that very thing that will communicate a special bond between us, that will say, this is a gift uniquely from me to you, and it is awesome. because you are awesome. and i am awesome. and yes, we, together, are awesome.

but finding that special gift is hard. it's not something you can force. it comes to you like a poem, a word or phrase nestled in the rubble of otherwise useless dreams. and you may not know this, but most of us are bad poets. we mistake cutesy rhythm and rhyme or archaic verbiage for inspiration. we can't feel the imagery or themes outside the cage of our own skull.

and so, barring the miracle of the true muse or the true poet, the giver who undertakes a listless christmas may be giving just that, a listless christmas.

instead, i like to think of the christmas list as a tool. if you tell me you like bawdy limericks about snails or that red wheelbarrow poem by william carlos williams, i might still write a bad poem, but at least i'll know where to start. at least i won't be groping around in an infinite wasteland of content, imagery, and form.

so why the post-christmas post on christmas lists? well, mostly i wanted to write about my new kindle. but i got sidetracked by memory and discovery.

this year i mostly received gifts that were on my list, and perhaps some part of me, the christmas list antipath, i suspect, felt cheated by the absence of new poetry.

yet there were little surprises--the fingerless gloves were black, not wool; the e-reader was a kindle, not a nook. and both did the trick; both delighted me in the end--the fingerless gloves perfectly allowed me to adjust my temp when running the polar bear 5K on new year's day, and the kindle has pleasantly surprised me with how much i enjoy reading (and browsing) using its interface.

but above all, there was the unsuspected awesomeness of sharing in those gifts with the givers, in reading to my parents from my kindle as we trekked south to eugene, in accompanying my dad to a chilly wild-card playoff game at qwest stadium and high-fiving him ecstatically (while wearing those gloves) when marshawn lynch clicked it into beast mode, breaking eight tackles and stiff-arming his way to a sixty-seven yard run.

because, after all, what's more awesome than a crazy game that makes nfl and underdog history? what's more awesome than sixty thousand people losing their voices in praise of one thing? this is how i imagine heaven--a gift and an unbridled sense of exultation and joy. and no list could have scripted that.

a pretext to an ash wednesday observation 2

"hi, i'm andrew, and i'm an aholic. (see this post for the first part of the story.)"

"hi, andrew."

"i suppose that means that i'm an all-around addict. for instance, steve told me about mike sando's seahawks blog, and i've spent most of my evening reading about the grant (wistrom) release and (deon grant) signing. you've probably noticed that i'm addicted to blogging, and i also tend to grow enamored with particular topics. catholicism is one of those topics. however, my first catholic mass occurred years before the birth of my catholicism obsession. i hadn't yet puzzled over an alberto ferreiro christian history quiz or posted provocative questions on a catholic answers forum. and i certainly wasn't catholic. thus it was with great trepidation that one sunday i found myself in a communion line, approaching a real-life catholic priest.

"in protestant churches, communion is nearly always a serious affair, but there is often a subdued hint of celebration. here, everyone seemed downright stoic. i understood the mood, but i was rather worried about that sober-looking priest. as each congregant received the elements, they performed some kind of a ritual with their hands and then mumbled conspiratorially with the cleric. i hoped they weren't speaking latin. there was no way that i would pull this off.

"for a moment i thought of the last supper. it was as if i was one of christ's oft-confused apostles: nudge, nudge. hey, peter. peter! what's he mean with this 'take and eat my body crap'? he's so bloody morbid. i just don't get it. but that's as close as i got to jerusalem. instead of forgiveness and community, i was wondering how the grim-faced padre was going to handle my insubordination when i failed to dip the wafer at the proper angle. this could turn ugly fast.

"peter (my good high school buddy, not the simon peter, rock of christianity) was now standing with the priest at the altar. that meant i was next. i bowed my head, and prayed 'lord, help me do this right.'

"the heavens chuckled and the priest beckoned me with his eyes. sharp, searching eyes, peering into my soul, scanning my contents for a date of confirmation, confession, anything to identify me as a true believer. i stood still, hoping that the priest would make the first move, kindly offer me some bread and wine. (andrew, what a great surprise! here's a wafer and some juice, take these in memory of christ's death for you.) the second dragged mercilessly into two seconds, and then three. he seemed to be waiting, but i was frozen with indecision. suddenly, my body spasmed into action. i may have cupped my hands, i may have made the sign of a cross, i may have flagged down a wayward aircraft, it's rather unclear. as my body performed this mysterious communion jig, i stared at the priest, channeling silent pleas into his brain.

"and then he frowned. it was only a subtle downward settling of the lips, but i knew that the church was about to erupt into a chorus of fire and brimstone. and then pitch forks, stones, and fiery stakes. i was a goner.

"but the priest spared me the death knell. he handed me the wafer, i drank the wine, and the morning's trauma was complete. i escaped saint joseph's but i'm still haunted by a sense of paranoia whenever i attend a catholic mass. i'm older and wiser, and i now know that protestants aren't welcome in the communion line. while this may mean that i can safely wait in my seat during the eucharist, it also accentuates my sense that i'm an impostor. i walk into a cathedral and think, 'hey, everybody, i'm not catholic, look at me!' "

andrew david. "radical dizziness, an unmentioned symptom of non-catholics who take catholic communion" seattle, wa.

weather report

the seattle forecast for tomorrow is sunny. expect bright blue sky and temperatures in the mid to lower 70s. some fall leaves may tumble to the ground and crunch beneath your feet, but don't expect any rain drops. indeed, it will be bright and sunny well into sunday night when the 3-0 seattle seahawks will bring rain to the sad city of chicago.

andrew david. "dude waving hawk flag" seattle, wa.
SEAHAWKS 42, GIANTS, 30 - and i was there! but i'm not sure about this guy...

seahawks 9, lions 6

my bleeding heart catharsis

i'm sure you've heard the term 'bleeding heart liberal.' it's the conservative way of mocking the left's dedication to social welfare programs. slang-slinging republicans contend that many liberals hear a single sob story and then forge their entire political doctrine with the aim of helping that poor unfortunate soul. that's fine, the conservative might say, but the problem is that these 'bleeding heart' agendas tend to offer free hand-outs to a vast contingent of welfare abusers.

politically, i fall somewhere between the bleeding hearts and their conservative counterparts. however, i'm starting to develop a bleeding heart complex of an altogether different kind: i'm becoming a 'bleeding heart sports fan.' after the seahawks unfathomable playoff loss and the uw huskies sweet sixteen loss, i just can't help complaining about the biased stated of officiating in sports. seriously, i'm sick of sports. that is, i'm sick of sports officiating, and unfortunately, in most sports it's impossible to separate the two. maybe i should join the rest of america and take up nascar.

i don't mean to scapegoat the boys in black and white, i just can't see why they have to make themselves the pivotal piece of sports. refs are like wallpaper -- you only notice them if the colors aren't right. friday's NCAA battle of the dawgs featured more foul calls than minutes, including several lopsided calls against uw that turned the tide of the game in favor of uconn (e.g., the double foul on roy). actually, i think that lorenzo deserves serious props for holding off the uconn advance while half of his starters sat on the pine. and, aggg! the missed goal-tending call? if the refs can swap fouls back and forth between players several minutes after the original play, why can't they review a simple goaltending call? in any case, as sean wrote in yesterday's comments, uw certainly made some stupid mistakes (although, i don't think applebee was necessarily wrong to dish it off. in that situation, i think you really do want to let some more time slip off the clock. besides, wasn't the lane filled with several big guys? applebee wasn't the one to make the awful pass...), uconn showed some more last-minute heroics, and ultimately, us seattle fans should (just forget about the bad calls and) simply be proud of our dawgs.

(but, holy sammamish, it sure is hard)

ps. have you ever wondered what it would be like to roll around in liquid wax? do you think you would burn yourself? it hurts a bit when you stick your finger in candle wax, but it certainly doesn't burn. well, obviously you couldn't dunk your head, but i think it might be fun.

two questions

1. anyone heard of herbie hancock? more particularly, is he a one-hit wonder as far as rockin-cool piano songs or could someone steer me in the direction of some goodies? i really liked the piano in 'stitched up,' but the other tracks on his recent album seemed lame.

2. let's talk seahawks. any first impressions regarding the off-season? we've lost hutchinson, failed to snag abraham, acquired peterson, and kept alexander happy -- is this shaping out to be a bust or another shining spring for ruskell and reinfeldt?


andrew david 'flesh eating clown fish' puerto vallarta, mexico.

super bowl xl autopsy

i'm disgusted. my philosopher of football (steve) once had me convinced that the those whistle-wearing zebras play a far greater role in the outcome of an nba game than an nfl game. however, i don't think i'd be using much hyperbole to say that sunday's super bowl xl was the most lopsided example of officiating that i've ever seen. honestly, i'm tempted to write a letter to the nfl and demand an apology.

but settle down, andrew, let's take a step back. stay calm...think happy thoughts...

okay, happy thoughts. well, before football there was ping pong. every day after school, my bestfriend and i would sprint into my basement lair and play game after game of ping pong. in fact, we developed an entire pro-ping-pong league. brandon and i were ping-pong gods. i don't mean to imply that we were unbeaten titans of the table; yes, brandon had a killer slam and a crazy-goose style which he recently described as 'a bit out there,' and, yes, the chatty play-by-play crew (that'd be brandon and me) aptly dubbed one of the 'players' on one of my better teams 'stonewall jackson' (i.e., the little white ball of ping-pong goodness just never made it by me), but really our table tennis divinity was less suggestive of our mad-hot skills than our at-will tinkering within the league. because we each managed (and played for) about half of the league, we could doll out wins and losses between our teams with unabashed favortism. in other words, if my bamboo chargers posted a losing record against brandon's teams, i could still pull enough victories from within my set of teams to assure the bc of a mid- to top-seed in the grand, end of the season tourney.

aside from an explosive atmosphere of fun competition, the nfl should bear little resemblance to my ping pong days. it's ridiculous to postulate that nfl commissioner paul tagliabue is pulling strings like some grade school gepetto...right? well, something isn't right. regardless of how i fiddled with the win/loss columns or attempted to stack our table tennis tourneys, it always came down to a gritty showdown, brandon and i in a last race to 21 points.

but the boys in black and white (or is that yellow and white?) seem to think they're nfl gods (more like nfl demons if you're a seahawks fan).

okay, okay, my analogy may be full of holes and a bit silly. after all, i see no easy way to incorporate dropped balls (jerramy stevens) and injuries (andre dyson; marquand isn't that an odd name? manuel, and rocky bernard) into the ping-pong parallel. and how does one explain holmgren's odd play clock management style? in any case, these issues, while important, all seem secondary. let's face it, the mvp award should have gone to referee bill leavy.

my stomach's getting queasy, so its about time to wrap up this rant. before i go, i want to share one last ping-pong memory. occasionally, our ping-pong battles would be disrupted by a parental cry from above or by the low hanging ceiling or, believe it or not, what one of us perceived as a questionable call. in these cases we developed the most indisputable method of settling arguments: 'the do-over.' that is, we would simply serve the ball again and replay that point. perhaps a super bowl with this many bad calls should steel a page from the andrew-brandon playbook, perhaps it simply deserves a do-over.

seahawks predictions?

seahawks 24, steelers 21

a four-night pictoral premonition of SEAHAWKS victory

looking into the future, i can just barely hear a chorus of popping champagne corks and the tearful cheers of the 12th man. yes, i see it clearly now: the space needle exploding into bright bursts of light, celebratory fireworks to honor the super bowl xl champions. oh, look i can even upload these visions onto my blog. how 'bout that...
123
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okay, so these pics are from new years eve night, not february 5th. still, i'm sure we'll have some kind of tribute when we win...(please win, please!!!)

SEAHAWKS are goin' to the SUPERBOWL!

the idea of a seattle team playing for the national football league superbowl is far, far outside the scope of my cerebralsphere. in other matters, i had an interesting conversation with conybeare about punctuation this morning. he was wondering how to punctuate something like this:

can you tell me how to get to sesame street (is it scary there?)?
can you tell me how to get to sesame street (is it scary there?)
can you tell me how to get to sesame street (is it scary there)?

any opinions?

[1.25.05:]

2 votes (beth, mari) for item one. 1 vote (joel) for: can you tell me how to get to sesame street? (is it scary there?) i agree with everyone; based upon my initial grammar god consult (CMS, the everyday writer, and a forum), i think that item one is technically correct. and i strongly agree with joel in that the best way to avoid awkward structure is to just recast the sentence. still, i wonder if can you tell me how to get to sesame street? (is it scary there?) may result in a subtle change in meaning. structurally, it puts a bit more space between the two sentences and thereby may increase the difference in meaning between the two. joel, do you ALWAYS make parenthetical sentences their own sentence or only at the end of sentences? (e.g., would you alter this: the dinosaur (scholars continue to insist that 'dino' means terrible and that 'saur' means lizard) groaned once and was silent. okay, that's a horrible example...

to make matters even more confusing, the cms might actually campaign for item two; here's a similar example from the CMS (well, almost):

Who shouted, 'Fire!'

that's right, no question mark. here's another interesting one:

here favorite songs are 'hello dolly!' 'chicago,' and 'come with me.'

SEAHAWKS poetry

it may be lame, but in appreciation of tomorrow's big game, i'd like to recycle an old comment:

Lo, who, incidentally, i just met in-person at matt basinger's birthday party: tsk tsk. poetry and sports. interesting blog. you've made me think.

Andrew: and don't you think that its about time that football and poetry (even if it be my mock poems) finally

collide
what is poetry
if not the brutal
clashing of bones? words
mashed together

on the one-yard line
with a phrase (or two)
coming untucked.
syntactical shaun alexanders,
dashing for an endzone
of the sublime...

and, might i add, scoring many, many touchdowns on our way to detroit.

-------------
whitney -- i still haven't responded entirely to your message. instead, i've tossed stones at yet another conservative position by your friend with the bumper sticker. // patty griffin's love throws a line & ben fold's last polka.

crazy bumper sticker and GO HAWKS!

hmmm...check out this bumper sticker that the washington state democratic party almost sold on their website. here's an apology from the chairman. here's how i found out about this. oh, and if you read to the end of the comments on that first link, you'll see my response.

anyway, the HAWKS play at 1:30. and thanks to my amazing, beautiful, brilliant, literate, hard-working, well-dressed, philosophical, generous, travel-savvy, stylish, conscientious, artsy, fun-loving, admirably righteous, clever, contact-wearing, cute, soon-to-be-football crazed girlfriend, i'll sitting at the 20 yard line!

that's right, i'll be at the game!

me...andrew...at a SEAHAWKS playoff game to see the first HAWK playoff victory on the road to the superbowl!

GO HAWKS!!!

[sometime later, its also the 5th comment to this post]
whitney -

here's what i HATE: contentedly chewing on a candy-cane only to find that - yuck! - you've been eating candy cane wrapper. and then begins the desperation; contorting the tongue into the molars in order to pry out htose pesky plastic pieces. and then the chocking. aggh.

[1/25/06]
whitney, face it, if you're a democrat, then you're a heathen. all of you left-wing liberals are just a bunch of sinners. oh,wait...i guess that's true of republicans too. well, so much for that.

it seems to me that the assumption that 'everyone should be as i am' is just another part of being human. hearkening back to psych 101, i think that this philosophy is the second or third tier of maslow's pyramid. once your material needs are satisfied, you look up from your happy belly and start to ponder how everyone else isn't meeting your needs.

at least that's my experience. some folks, myself included, have a laundry list of things that christians (or moral people) can't do. i don't think that's altogether bad -- in fact, its kinda' crucial to have a moral compass -- its just that our laundry lists tend to grows longer and less flexible as time goes by. soon enough, we only value other christians, other republicans, other people that we view as tolerant. so, to conclude, democrats are the same way. as a seattleite i doubt i can even count the number of times that i've heard rash generalizations of conservatives as unenlightened, cross-bearing idiots; as if democrats have the monopoly on intelligence. ultimately, i think those clowns at reefer magnets and the wsdp had a novel idea, except instead of writing HYPOCRITE on that Jesus-fish, the bumper sticker should have tatooed the slogan across the forehead of a generic stick-figure. we're all just a bunch of hypocrites.

countdown

in 4 days the seahawks will have their first ever playoff win during my fanhood.

go HAWKS!