Back.

Spring has sprung.

Dusk has been stretched again into that long, linger-y hour where laughter rings and frisbees are thrown and Blue Moons are drunk.

And with the coming of spring, I'm writing again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know I'm a yo-yo dieter when it comes to getting the words to actually stick to the page, but I'll try again.

Bob Goff told a friend of mine to read Stephen Pressfield's The War of Art. And she told me to read it. I like them both (and the chapters were short), so I did. This little passage feels particularly applicable to the matter at hand:

"What's particularly insidious about the rationalizations that Resistance presents to us is that a lot of them are true. They're legitimate. Our wife may really be in her eighth month of pregnancy; she may in truth need us at home. Our department may really be instituting a changeover that will eat up hours of our time. Indeed it may make sense to put off finishing our dissertation, at least till after the baby's born.

What Resistance leaves out, of course, is that all this means diddly. Tolstoy had thirteen kids and wrote War and Peace. Lance Armstrong had cancer and won the Tour de France three years and counting.


If Resistance couldn't be beaten, there would be no Fifth Symphony, no Romeo and Juliet, no Golden Gate Bridge. Defeating Resistance is like giving birth. It seems absolutely impossible until you remember that women have been pulling it off successfully, with support and without, for fifty million years."


I work three days a week and have no kids, no mortgage and no dog. I suppose I could take a minute or two and jot a few things down.

Dragons of 'ought'

"I wrote fairy tales because the Fairy Tale seemed the ideal Form for the stuff I had to say.

I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood.

Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to.

An obligation to feel can freeze feelings.

And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical.

But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency?

Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could."

- C.S. Lewis, Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's to be Said

Clear eyes, full hearts.

Just in case you're ever in a situation and you want people to love Texas, but you're not sure how to explain, NBC has created a really helpful tool.

Thanks to the Dillon Panthers, unsuspecting folks around the universe have fallen for my home state -- in all of it's big-haired glory. FNL has come with a vengeance to our house. Jac and I were glued to his laptop in front of the fire for at least eight episodes on Saturday and he's now finished the first and second season in a record-breaking three days. Last night at dinner, he announced, "Like, physically I'm here, but I'm actually not here. I'm actually in Dillon. Playing football."

The fact that Jac's escaping to another world -- that's no surprise. We all love to settle in when we hear his voice subtly change to the tone we've learned to know as "the voice Jac uses when exiting reality and entering his imaginary dream lives." It's always good. It usually involves several illustrious careers in all fields where one can become famous, and ends with a heartbreaking choice between Rhianna and Megan Fox as the lucky girl who gets to marry him. And then we all start rolling on the floor laughing, because it's way better live than I could possibly show here.

I'm just glad that now these dreams have taken a complete shift to be filled with cutoff t-shirts and Texan cuties. He even suggested that Bev make front-yard signs for him and wear a button with his face to his next rugby match. (Things I've been suggesting for months now, just quietly.)

If Texas gets a stint with Jac Cameron, you'll all be the better for it. And if it takes Coach Taylor and Lila Garrity to get him there, I'm not going to be one to throw a fuss.

In Timmy Riggins' own words,

"Here's to good friends and Texas."