One of the homes that I lived in with my parents when I was a teenager is on the market. Dad and I drove by it today on the way to my sister’s home, and I immediately began fantasizing about purchasing it, doing extensive remodeling, and turning it into our dream home.
The house is quite small, but sits on three acres of land in a rural location. I imagined how we’d add onto the existing structure, landscape, even dig a pond. I was so swept up in my fantasy that I was certain Honey would feel the same way.
After arriving home and telling him about my amazing discovery, we drove out for him to see it in person. Where I saw potential, he saw a mountain of debt. As we discussed the amount of work and money it would take to whip the property into shape, I realized that he was right.
I seem to have an emotional attachment to houses or neighborhoods where we lived while I was growing up. Maybe that is why I currently live in the house that’s only two doors down from the home my parents lived in when I was born. It was over eleven years ago that I discovered this house was for sale, and I couldn’t buy it fast enough! Perhaps my eagerness over the house we looked at today is more a testament to my sentimentality than anything else.
Sitting at home with my dreams dashed, I began to pout a little. Then the phone rang. The neighbor’s son was calling to ask if we could get his mom up off the floor. As familiar as this scenario has become, it never fails to elicit feelings of panic and dread. We scurried over to find her in the kitchen floor, wincing in pain with blood dripping from two open wounds.
We cleaned and bandaged her scrapes and helped her into the recliner – reassuring her and her son that they can call on us anytime they need help. That’s when I realized that we’re probably right where we need to be – at least for the time being. The dream house will just have to wait.
I must have tried a hundred different themes since moving my blog to self-hosted. There are literally thousands of available themes that can completely transform the look of a blog with the click of a button, but it seems that most themes fall into one of two categories – beautiful or functional. I quickly realized that simple designs which put the focus on content and usability make more sense than flashy, slow-to-load sites that are more geared toward making a visual statement.
The theme I’m currently using, Vigilance, seems to combine beauty and function. It’s simple, it loads fast, and it’s easy to navigate. It’s also designed to be browser and search engine friendly. Hopefully, it will also prove to be user friendly.
Let me know what you think!
Watch these smooth criminals from the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center get down to Michael Jackson music! The ending is fantastic.
Michael wrote the following essay in 2000. It offers a fascinating insight into his thoughts on God and faith.
My Childhood, My Sabbath, My Freedom
By Michael Jackson
What I wanted more than anything was to be ordinary. The Sabbath was when I could be.
Childhood
“Have you seen my childhood?
I’m searching for that wonder in my youth
Like pirates in adventurous dreams,
Of conquest and kings on the throne…”
Written and Composed by Michael Jackson
In one of our conversations together, my friend Rabbi Shmuley told me that he had asked some of his colleagues–-writers, thinkers, and artists-–to pen their reflections on the Sabbath. He then suggested that I write down my own thoughts on the subject, a project I found intriguing and timely due to the recent death of Rose Fine, a Jewish woman who was my beloved childhood tutor and who traveled with me and my brothers when we were all in the Jackson Five.
Last Friday night I joined Rabbi Shmuley, his family, and their guests for the Sabbath dinner at their home. What I found especially moving was when Shmuley and his wife placed their hands on the heads of their young children, and blessed them to grow to be like Abraham and Sarah, which I understand is an ancient Jewish tradition. This led me to reminisce about my own childhood, and what the Sabbath meant to me growing up.
When people see the television appearances I made when I was a little boy–8 or 9 years old and just starting off my lifelong music career–they see a little boy with a big smile. They assume that this little boy is smiling because he is joyous, that he is singing his heart out because he is happy, and that he is dancing with an energy that never quits because he is carefree.
But while singing and dancing were, and undoubtedly remain, some of my greatest joys, at that time what I wanted more than anything else were the two things that make childhood the most wondrous years of life, namely, playtime and a feeling of freedom. The public at large has yet to really understand the pressures of childhood celebrity, which, while exciting, always exacts a very heavy price.
More than anything, I wished to be a normal little boy. I wanted to build tree houses and go to roller-skating parties. But very early on, this became impossible. I had to accept that my childhood would be different than most others. But that’s what always made me wonder what an ordinary childhood would be like.
There was one day a week, however, that I was able to escape the stages of Hollywood and the crowds of the concert hall. That day was the Sabbath. In all religions, the Sabbath is a day that allows and requires the faithful to step away from the everyday and focus on the exceptional. I learned something about the Jewish Sabbath in particular early on from Rose, and my friend Shmuley further clarified for me how, on the Jewish Sabbath, the everyday life tasks of cooking dinner, grocery shopping, and mowing the lawn are forbidden so that humanity may make the ordinary extraordinary and the natural miraculous. Even things like shopping or turning on lights are forbidden. On this day, the Sabbath, everyone in the world gets to stop being ordinary.
But what I wanted more than anything was to be ordinary. So, in my world, the Sabbath was the day I was able to step away from my unique life and glimpse the everyday.
Sundays were my day for “Pioneering,” the term used for the missionary work that Jehovah’s Witnesses do. We would spend the day in the suburbs of Southern California, going door to door or making the rounds of a shopping mall, distributing our Watchtower magazine. I continued my pioneering work for years and years after my career had been launched.
Up to 1991, the time of my Dangerous tour, I would don my disguise of fat suit, wig, beard, and glasses and head off to live in the land of everyday America, visiting shopping plazas and tract homes in the suburbs. I loved to set foot in all those houses and catch sight of the shag rugs and La-Z-Boy armchairs with kids playing Monopoly and grandmas baby-sitting and all those wonderfully ordinary and, to me, magical scenes of life. Many, I know, would argue that these things seem like no big deal. But to me they were positively fascinating.
The funny thing is, no adults ever suspected who this strange bearded man was. But the children, with their extra intuition, knew right away. Like the Pied Piper of Hamlin, I would find myself trailed by eight or nine children by my second round of the shopping mall. They would follow and whisper and giggle, but they wouldn’t reveal my secret to their parents. They were my little aides. Hey, maybe you bought a magazine from me. Now you’re wondering, right?
Sundays were sacred for two other reasons as I was growing up. They were both the day that I attended church and the day that I spent rehearsing my hardest. This may seem against the idea of “rest on the Sabbath,” but it was the most sacred way I could spend my time: developing the talents that God gave me. The best way I can imagine to show my thanks is to make the very most of the gift that God gave me.
Church was a treat in its own right. It was again a chance for me to be “normal.” The church elders treated me the same as they treated everyone else. And they never became annoyed on the days that the back of the church filled with reporters who had discovered my whereabouts. They tried to welcome them in. After all, even reporters are the children of God.
When I was young, my whole family attended church together in Indiana. As we grew older, this became difficult, and my remarkable and truly saintly mother would sometimes end up there on her own. When circumstances made it increasingly complex for me to attend, I was comforted by the belief that God exists in my heart, and in music and in beauty, not only in a building. But I still miss the sense of community that I felt there–I miss the friends and the people who treated me like I was simply one of them. Simply human. Sharing a day with God.
When I became a father, my whole sense of God and the Sabbath was redefined. When I look into the eyes of my son, Prince, and daughter, Paris, I see miracles and I see beauty. Every single day becomes the Sabbath. Having children allows me to enter this magical and holy world every moment of every day. I see God through my children. I speak to God through my children. I am humbled for the blessings He has given me.
There have been times in my life when I, like everyone, has had to wonder about God’s existence. When Prince smiles, when Paris giggles, I have no doubts. Children are God’s gift to us. No–they are more than that–they are the very form of God’s energy and creativity and love. He is to be found in their innocence, experienced in their playfulness.
My most precious days as a child were those Sundays when I was able to be free. That is what the Sabbath has always been for me. A day of freedom. Now I find this freedom and magic every day in my role as a father. The amazing thing is, we all have the ability to make every day the precious day that is the Sabbath. And we do this by rededicating ourselves to the wonders of childhood. We do this by giving over our entire heart and mind to the little people we call son and daughter. The time we spend with them is the Sabbath. The place we spend it is called Paradise.
Finally saw Avatar last night. This was my first 3D movie, and what a way to start! I was awestruck by the creativity, the story, and the fact that nothing looked computer generated.
I scurried into Walmart this afternoon to look for a small computer desk. Office stores are hard to come by in our small town, and although I don’t usually like the quality of their furniture, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to look.
As our computer needs and habits change, we’ve found ourselves relying on the two notebooks much more than the desktop that occupies the large, L-shaped desk in the spare bedroom. Because space is a real commodity in our home, it makes sense to replace it with something smaller. Anyway, that’s another blog post. Back to my story.
So, I’m browsing Walmart’s pitiful selection of fake wood furniture, when I hear a sound that stopped me dead in my tracks.
You knock me off of my feet now, baby! Whoooooooo!
As the bass line to “The Way You Make Me Feel” began blaring throughout the store, I forgot all about furniture and starting looking for the source. Just as I turned the corner, I saw the most beautiful of sights. An oasis of Michael Jackson merchandise in the middle of retail hell. Sparkly Jackson jewelry, t-shirts, handbags, buttons, posters, books, and CD’s lined the shelves.
Resistance was futile.
A few minutes later, I was standing in the checkout lane with my plunder. “Do you love Michael Jackson?” asked the checkout girl as she roughly tugged a hanger from the neck hole in a t-shirt.
“I love Michael Jackson!” I proudly announced. “I have since ‘91,” I added to make sure she knew I wasn’t one of those born-again fans who only started liking him again after he died.
She made a little smirk and said, “I don’t like him.” And just like that, the thrill was gone.
As I made my way to the car with my merchandise, I considered what she must have thought of me; a 35-year-old man buying clothing and jewelry adorned with a pop star that she cares nothing about.
Poor girl. She just doesn’t know what she’s missing.
Ever read or see something that makes your diaphragm unexpectedly expand? Perhaps that’s what is meant by the expression “it took my breath away.” Some of these quotes by author Ernest Hemingway do that exactly.
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
“After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.”
“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”
“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
“About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”
“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
“A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.”
“All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”
“In order to write about life first you must live it.”
“A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.”
“Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.”
“Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love.”
“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?”
