The Wilderness

My job requires a lot of dangling, and today required no less than that. I dangled. No I am not a pimp, nor do I "dangle" in the pimp sense, but in the "hey, you're the tallest, skinniest, lightest, most limber, and youngest guy in this company... Go up in the ceiling!" sense. I was going to have all of these pictures to show you that I took today. It's one of the biggest projects that I've been on since I've been with the company... Scratch that, not the biggest, but the coolest. Ron (my co-worker) and I are installing a new sound system into the Tennessee Tech School of Music auditorium. It's big and there's a pipe organ. There's also a 70 foot drop below me as I swing through the rafters, but I enjoy doing it. It's like a grown-up jungle gym. Don't worry, I'll be fine. There is dry wall between me and the floor, and from my inspection, it's 3-thick. That'll stop my light-ass body from falling through. Uh... but the pictures... oh yeah... I left my cell phone in my tool belt which I left on the job locked in the auditorium... so that's where my phone is. Doh! (slaps his face with the palm of his hand).

But man was today hard. I was pulling cable through conduit and my hands are raw and my back is soar. We spent 11 hours on the clock. I feel good about that though. Per dium and 11 hour days = bank!

Oh, so I guess I should tell you that I'm not in Nashville. I'm actually in a High Point sized town called Cookeville which is about 1.5 hours east of Nashvegas. I decided to bring my computer with me because I don't have a lap top, iTouches are too expensive, and why not, this computer is small. I'll be here all week though and my room is great. It's a king sized bed which I could lay on sideways and still be completely contained within its boundaries.

I've been needing this though, and I realize that now that I'm here. I feel like I've got these layers of stress that are melting off of my skin. I'm tired, sure, but I feel loose and more relaxed. There's been stuff happening that's been getting me pretty uptight lately back at the house. It's hard to be in a serious situation where all of your friends aren't on board with you, but in something like this, it's more of a desire than a need. It's been stressing me out that some of my friends can't understand me or be happy for me being with Lindsay. She's so great and she's found that part of me that I put away a long time ago, even before college, because I was ashamed and afraid of getting hurt. Is it so strange that I should want to spend a lot of time with her?

I think I just have a hard time apologizing when I don't think I'm wrong. That's strange because usually I'm a pretty broken person. It's easy for people to make me feel guilty about something because I've been conditioned to that kind of thinking. It's only been recently that God has really been trying to root that out of my life because that kind of thinking has nothing to do with Jesus. But because I always bounce from one extreme to another, when people around me mistake my charisma for being a show-off or me telling stories about stuff I've experienced as being arrogant, it no longer makes me feel guilty. It makes me feel angry. It makes me want to push them away. Either way I suppose I still hold on to the passive aggressive mentality. It either tells me that I'm wrong or that I will destroy them with my intensity.

This is all stuff that I guess I just need to go into the wilderness and figure out. I need more than just answers, I need to be changed from within. That's why this week will be good. I can't just go and rely on my comforts. I'm going to be working my ass off all day for the next several days and then coming back to my room to sit and contemplate. There's always TV, but I don't really like TV anymore. TV shows are lame (except for Metalocalypse, maybe Scrubbs, stuff like that). But I digress. TV is lame.

Peace and Love