More later, but I’ll leave you with Cassady’s birth announcement.  Ain’t she cute???

It’s an airplane made of a candy cane, piece of gum, and marshmellows. He supposedly does it every year and goes all around Rogers passing out the little nuggets of joy to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. I absolutely LOVE old people, and he brought a tear or two to my eyes. I’m not going to lie.

Whether it be out of boredom or whatever, he took time to make probably hundreds of those, then starts his yearly trek around town (on his walker, I might add) to hand them out.

So sweet.

So, my niece is finally here! After hours and hours of labor, Lori
finally delivered a healthy baby girl, Laila Ann, at 5:38 a.m. today,
Sept. 28th.

She weighed in at a whopping 9lbs 4oz, and she is 21 inches long.

To
tell you about the experience of watching her be born and going through
every emotion thinkable would be too much for my very tired mind. Just
know that it was amazing and scary and sad . . . When she was born,
there wasn’t a dry eye in the room. It’s an experience that’s sort of
indescribably amazing.

So she’s here in this world now. Keep
Lori et al in your thoughts as she recovers and they learn how to be
parents! They’re going to be great!

“Like a fool, I fell in love with you,
Turned my whole world upside down.
Layla, you’ve got me on my knees, Layla.” ~ Eric Clapton

I’m still wiping tears from my eyes . . .

dream [dreem] noun, verb

a. an involuntary vision occurring to a person when awake. b. a vision voluntarily indulged in while awake; daydream; reverie. c. an aspiration; goal; aim.

He Wishes For The Cloths of Heaven

HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. 

                                        ~W.B. Yeats

Spreading your dreams under someone’s feet isn’t easy . . .

I think we’ve lost the wonder of it all, don’t you?  I feel like the more I learn, the less magic there is.  Our quest and obsession for knowledge, to have an answer for every question thrown our way, has maybe taken some of the faith out of faith.  And I’m not sure the last time my faith has been child-like.  Full of wide-eyed wonder, unconditional love, dreaming impossible dreams.

American Christianity (and when I say that, I mean this kind of sub-committee, business-oriented, denominationally-driven, “worship center”, rule-driven religion) is choking the magic of the Creator.  It’s taking away my ability to fall head first, to dream in impossibilities, to live in wonder and awe.

And I’m letting it happen.

“There is no use in trying,” said Alice; “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,”said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

        ~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

They were the 18th and 19th of the 20 rescued from the rubble after the buildings collapsed. Port Authority Police Officers Will Jimeno, played by Crash actor Micheal Pena, was 18, and John McLoughlin, played by Oscar winner Nicholas Cage, was number 19.

The movie centers around their story of survival, and how they deal with their world that has literally crashed down around them.  The tag line of the film reads, “The World Saw Evil That Day. Two Men Saw Something Else.”

The movie begins with Cage’s character waking early for his day of work at the Times Square Port Authority. It starts off with such silence, almost like a kind of calm before the storm. It’s interesting to see these men begin their normal day, not knowing the events that are about to unfold. To avoid any spoilers, I’ll wrap the plot up by saying that a good portion of the movie deals with the wives of the two officers, played by Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal, and it shows rather intensely the wait they were put through throughout that day.

I have to admit that the movie wasn’t what I thought it would be, but kind of in a good way.  There were no sensational images of the planes hitting the towers (like we could forget what it looked like), and neither were there images of the towers coming down except for a quick shot shown on a television inside a home. It wasn’t focused on the what of it all, but just the who of it all.  It focused on the heros of the day, of that time. 

It was quite a moving film, as you can expect. I fought back tears through the majority, but then, at the very end as the theater lights were coming up, tears came.  On the screen were just words, listing off the number that died that day.  The number of countries affected. Words that summed up the characters lives in the present. How one of the marines in the film served two tours of duty after 9/11.  And the admiration kind of got me.

9/11 MEMORIAL IN ’04

Below are some pictures we took during a memorial on 9/11/04, the year I lived in NYC. Some friends and I went down there early that morning, making it in time for the first moment of silence when the first plane hit (which was around 8 a.m.).  The first moment of silence was followed by three more, one for the second tower hit and two at the precise moments each of the towers fell.  The moments of silence began with church bells ringing nearby and all across the city.  After the bells rang, complete and utter, and almost eerie, slience. Those were probably the only four moments I ever heard complete silence in the city.

The sight was insane.  One lady marched down the sidewalk with her politics on her sleeve, and a man turned back to her and quietly said, “This isn’t the time and place for that.”  Others clung to the gate that surrounds the site, listening to former Mayor Giuliani and present Mayor Bloomberg speak words of honor and sadness to the thousands of New Yorkers gathered that day.

You could pick out those people who knew someone that was killed that day.  Their faces were a little sadder, their tears a little heavier.  People came with cards and flowers to pay their respects.  My friends and I just kind of stood there, not really knowing what to do or how to feel. For that period of time, we were New Yorkers, and we felt pride in our city and even a little sad that we weren’t there for our fellow New Yorkers on that day three years earlier.

Three years earlier, I was still at UAM, and I was woken up by my radio alarm like I am every morning.  It had gone off just in time for me to hear the news that the first tower had been hit.  I didn’t learn the extent of the damage until class began that morning. I had no idea then that New York would become my second home.  When I moved there years later, I arrived with only one real memory of New York, and that was where I was when their world came crashing down.

The fire station directly next to the WTC site. They were the first on the scene after the attacks.

The street on the East side of the site. This is the a small part of the crowd there that day. They actually showed this street in a couple of shots during the movie.

The only beam left standing.  Hope in devastation.  It’s always there.

A t-shirt in the crowd.

A view of the inside of the site of all the people there that day.  The entire site is gated off due to construction, however, people were let inside for the memorial, and that’s where the mayors spoke from.

n 1: the trait of sincere and steadfast fixity of purpose; “a man of energy and commitment” [syn: committedness]
2: the act of binding yourself (intellectually or emotionally) to a
course of action; “his long commitment to public service”; “they felt
no loyalty to a losing team”

I’m a little commitment phobic, in that I’ve always
been someone who likes to take things one year at a time because as we
all know, a year can change everything in your life. ~Debra Messing

I don’t have a car payment. I don’t own a house; I rent. The only jobs I’ve had have only required one year contracts, even my current one. I’ve lived in three places in the last two years. I don’t have a boyfriend. I don’t have a pet. I don’t even have a freakin plant. But, I do have a blog.

It’s a lot more commitment than I was expecting, you know? I wonder if a blog will replace the plant in the whole scenario of “if you can keep it alive, you’re ready to date.” (it’s from the Sandra Bullock movie 28 Days, in case I’m the only one who knows that scenario)

So, I’ve not done a very good job updating the blog. I mean, I’m not terrible. I’m not Phillip. But, it’s definitely a responsibility I wasn’t expecting, and, seeing as though I’m so bad at commitment, I probably didn’t really want it either.

I beg you, please bare with me. This whole blogging thing is more than blogging, sort of. It’s hopefully getting me ready for that plant.

There’s a Switchfoot song called “24″, and there’s this one part that has always stuck out to me::

 And You’re raising these twenty four voices

With twenty four hearts

With all of my symphonies

In twenty four parts

So, I’m 25 now, but it still works.  Anyhow, I have this theory that we are all made up of different parts, and they aren’t always in sync with each other.  That, figuratively, we all have multiple personalities. Now, I’m not really going to get into specifics about what brought me to this, but it’s just crazy how I know one thing and do another.  Believe one way, feel another.  Love one thing, love another.

Depending on the day depends on what I think, what I believe, what I feel, what I love.  And, it scares the heck out of me sometimes.  It’s one of the things about myself that constantly remind me that I am weak, that I am human.  Don’t get me wrong, I have tons of flaws.  But this constant double-mindedness, of thoughts that aren’t of Him, are the things that truly make me feel out of control.

It’s good to continually realize that you’re human, realizing what you’re made of – the flesh and the Spirit.  They’re constantly wrestling inside each of us, I guess, and constantly making us know one thing and do another. Believe one way, feel another.  Love one thing, love another.

Paul had it right when he said Romans 7, “21It seems to be a fact of life that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong. 22I love God’s law with all my heart. 23But
there is another law at work within me that is at war with my mind.
This law wins the fight and makes me a slave to the sin that is still
within me.”

So, all of my 25 hearts and then some. It’s in me, and having these multiple personalities is the tension of being a believer, of wrestling with who I am and who I’m supposed to be.  So, maybe the best thing to do is pray the prayer that Jon Foreman wrote in the next lines of “24″::

I want to be one today

You’re raising the dead in me

How many parts do you have?

technorati tags:switchfoot, 24, mulitple, personalities